Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post is a Super Serious Journalism Paper:
The new F-word: Father

I strongly considered adding this as a second bonus post on the end of the last Father’s Day post, but looking further it became rapidly clear that this deserved the full mango treatment.

Because, you see, Kathleen Parker has daddy issues. Or rather, she’s got the entire run of Daddy in chronological order safely stored in individual mylar bags inside a temperature controlled “collection room” except for dual copies of the ultra rare June 1949 issue with the backwards SKU code, which of course are kept in the air-tight combination safe.

Which is sadly extremely understandable, seeing as how the “pinnacles of American journalism” have always been loath to hire any woman who didn’t carry enough water for their disapproving and slightly abusive father figures. It helps them fit better with all the men who are doing the same.

And boo on any of us who seem to put the two and two together on how this leads to endless cheerleading for whichever Republican figure of the moment can best perform whatever psychodrama necessary for the collected age-play fetishists to engage in a little shadow play with.

But anyways, you can already tell that you’re in for a treat before you even scroll down. The New F-word? Like we’re all 5 years old and the notion of someone saying “fuck” in this day and age is a shocking taboo we’re all supposed to ooooh over. And of course, we have the whole “father is a bad word” malarky from which the IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION wafts off it like an open sewer cover. And that’s before we even put the two together and realize that some complete hack thought that was a clever way to link their latest brainfart with a half-awareness of a minor holiday and then try and process it with the fact that said person easily makes more in a year than most of us make in ten or twenty without bursting into tears.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Women working outside the home for actual salaries clearly means that men need to be saved from the iron bootheels of the Gynofascist movement to eliminate all men. Thus to prevent this Vaginocalypse we as conservatives must step up our campaign of intense sexism and enforcement of the glass ceiling.

Yeah… one of these ones.

So what triggered this complete emotional meltdown at the consideration of armies of Homocidal Lesbian Terrorists (oh yeah, a Hothead Paisan reference) coming for her supply of slightly abusive penile-infused gentlemen?

News that women increasingly are the leading or sole breadwinner in the American family

Ah. Natch.

Yeah, this has been bubbling up under the surface of both MRAdom and general wingnuttery for a while now. It’s largely based around non-stories like this about how around 40% of American households have women as the economic head of the family.

Of course, said statistics are a bit of “Choose your Own Adventure” when smashed together like that with misleading shortenings like I just did. The actual science of it is simply what most of us are already aware of. Single parent families are more common now than 50 years ago because divorce is no longer a legally and socially prohibitive hellhole and it is no longer economic suicide to escape an abusive or unhappy relationship. Additionally, successes of feminism means that women actually working for real paychecks rather than as abused house slaves and sexual property has become commonplace and expected and young people are growing up without the same hangups as their parents over “who’s wearing the pants in the relationship” as long as the bills are being paid and the kids are fed.

And of course, the big giant elephant in the room, is also how the sitcom fantasy nuclear family model has become completely impossible thanks to the “successes” of right-wing economics. It’s downright impossible to not have both partners working after the Reagan years of the 80s, even for a middle class family. And in the 2000s, even that never seems to be enough to pay the rent and the grocery bill. There’s just no room for play-acting Stepford relationships.

Furthermore, though things have improved, it’s worth noting that we are still in the midst of Great Depression II: Electric Boogaloo and the particular spike that’s got conservatives running as if their heads were chopped off is almost entirely due to the fact that jobs more given to men were still staffed and paid to the point where they could be cut without literally destroying the ability of the corporate parasites to function. Whereas women have been underpaid and understaffed so long in the industries they are most likely to belong to that it proved completely impossible to fire them to the same degree. Hence “more” women being the breadwinners and sole income earners.

Now, even if it was just the “yay feminism” reasons and if we just looked at the highly misleading graphs, it’s still not much to get super-pumped about. The data collected is heavily flawed, ignores contextual information, conflates widely different family structures and tries and paint rather telling indications of inequality as burgeoning equality or worse, female supremacy.

Which is of course, why the conservatives are in full butt-clench mode over it. Especially as what little positive there is in the data is how it is pointing out the inevitability of the official demise of the 60s suburban fantasy now complete with Barbie and Ken.

And clearly, such an indication is indistinguishable from the nigh Femmepocalypse!

has resurrected the perennial question: Why do we need men?

Cause men are just disposable wallets, only useful for winning the bread we waste on eating bonbons and that made-up “groceries and toiletries” crap you say is necessary to make the magic Food Box work the way it’s supposed to, amirite?

… It never fails to amaze me how anti-feminists manage to convince the world that it was feminists who were the “man-haters”.

Maureen Dowd attempted to answer this question with her 2005 book, “Are Men Necessary?” I responded three years later with “Save the Males.”

If you read something by Maureen “I assume everyone also uses the President as a surrogate daddy to work out my various Freudian issues” Dowd and a) feel the need to respond to her with anything other than mockery or sadness and b) somehow manage to create a book that is somehow worse than her infamously troll epic?

You may just be a worthless skid mark on the underoos of society.

With each generation, the question becomes more declarative and querulous.

Oh Bob in Himmel, she’s taking the question seriously. I’m not entirely sure whether to burst into laughter or weep openly for the current standards of American journalism… so I’m going to go with both. Bwahahahboohoohoohahawaaaaah!

Huh, that’s oddly cathartic.

Recent demographic shifts show women gaining supremacy across a spectrum of quantitative measures, including education and employment.

Yes, mild not even fully equal gains in women’s rights = Female Supremacy
Decades upon centuries upon millennia of oppression and false enforcement of artificial separations between genders proved painfully untrue by said recent mild gains = WHAT ARE YOU BITCHES COMPLAINING ABOUT?!? THE PAST IS THE PAST AND BESIDES THAT’S THE NATURAL ORDER!

It also goes to show that the collected anti-feminists would completely shit their pants at even a fraction of what women and those read as women go through every day.

Women outnumber men in college and in most graduate fields.

I feel I’ve already covered this.
Have I already covered this?
Yeah… yeah, I’ve already covered this.

Increasingly, owing in part to the recession and job loss in historically male-dominated fields, they are surpassing men as wage-earners, though women still lag behind at the highest income and executive levels.

Well that a) seems to be an effect suspiciously absent the iron high heel of Gynofascism, but rather bears the tell-tale man-sized bootheels of boring old capitalist oppression, b) doesn’t actually mean a damn thing if they are still being barred from any position of meaningful power, influence, and high income, and c) rather transparently reveals that your freakout is nothing more than an excuse to kick down rather than dare examine the ways in which modern American capitalism may not be conducive to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Oh, also that d) Kathleen Parker needs to stop taking so much influence from David fucking Brooks.

My argument that men should be saved is that,

…

I’m imagining earning a 6-figure salary for sentences that begin like this. Fuck, community college freshmen taking the first Composition course of their entire lives can produce a better mock-academic opener to a sentence than that.

And yet she’s a Pulitzer winning journalist.

…

But no, there’s totally something worth saving in the broken edifice of American print journalism.

despite certain imperfections, men are fundamentally good and are sort of pleasant to have around.

…

Hello, Kathleen, I notice you’re having a very fine and stimulating conversation with that Scarecrow out there in the field. Which is why I hesitate to intervene and inform you that sadly, this isn’t fucking Oz, a transsexual princess isn’t sitting on the Emerald throne, and that lump of inanimate straw isn’t exactly going to start walking around and disagreeing with you, much less enact the modern Y-chromosome Holocaust you are imagining.

You…uh… do get that… right?

Most women still like to fall in love with them;

Well yes, the majority of women are in fact heterosexual… or rather are at the very least on the Kinsey spectrum between 0 and 5. Or more specific to your exact example, heteroromantic or biromantic women do indeed make up the majority of those women with romantic orientations. Though I would argue that love in general is hardly a choice, in much the same way as you can’t really choose who you fall in lust with and besides…

But I’m getting off track from the fact that nobody is really going around telling women that they aren’t allowed to fall in love with men or that falling in love with men is fictional or wrong. Plenty saying that women falling in love with women or women falling in love with those that fall in the in-between are wrong or deluded or sick. Plenty trying to enforce that with violence, discrimination, oppression, and sometimes rape. But the opposite? Not so much-

all children want a father no matter how often we try to persuade ourselves otherwise.

Yeah… no. Just no.

A kid with two (or three or four or even just one on her own) loving mommies isn’t going to be crying themselves to sleep over how they don’t have a “daddy” to make their lives complete. And honestly, isn’t really going to miss the inclusion of a “daddy” figure in their life outside of the social bigotry and dismissal they gets from greater society over what they’re “lacking”.

In the same way that the reverse is true. A kid raised by loving daddies isn’t going to miss the lack of a “mommy” outside that same general homophobic pressure.

And yeah, it’s worth noting the homophobic double-turn here. She acknowledged half-a-sentence ago the potential existence of homoromantic female relationships, before insisting that every child needs a dad and that it’s insanity to assume otherwise.

The viscerality of it combined with this whole bizarre strawman of a paragraph is making it very difficult to avoid concluding that the very notion of women existing in relationships, jobs, and lives without the validation and support of men is so frightening to her and her faith in the patriarchy that she assumes its some sort of vanguard to the complete elimination of men from daily life.

To which, sentences like:

If we continue to impose low expectations and negative messaging on men and boys, future women won’t have much to choose from.

This, just do not help.

Also, are men breeding stock in your analogies now? And you’re worried that an increasingly feminist culture is the one that’s disrespectful and insulting to men?

IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION, thy name is wingnut.

We are nearly there.

Yes, clearly, the footsoldiers of our gynocratic overlords are nearly busting down the doors of men everywhere. I saw a transman, hardly more than a teenager, pulled from his home and sent into a camp where abusive assholes harassed and yelled at him… oh wait, no, that was about some sort of “pray away the queerness” thing… hmmm, I’m sure, there’s some sort of proof, just give me a second.

The Pew Research Center recently found that four in 10 American households with children under age 18 include a mother who is either the primary breadwinner or the sole earner (quadruple the share in 1960). The latter category is largely owing to the surge in single-mother households.

Ah ha! I have found illicit feminazi training manuals detailing the secret plots to castrate, maim, and shoot our menfolk unless they comply with queer and feminist protocol. Disguised as mere alternative comic books from the 80s and 90s, these secret works by Comrades Diane DiMassa and Roberta Gregory reveal the truth! Wake up sheeple!

This reflects “evolving family dynamics,” according to the New York Times, which sounds rather nice — evolution being a good thing and all.

Did you hear the dog whistle, those of you in the back? The one where we are deliberately provoking the anti-evolution ideology of our increasingly evangelical christian base? I just wanted to check to make sure it got through, what with it being so subtle so we can still claim that people like us are “reasonable moderate conservatives”. Oh good, you did hear it? Excellent, cause if we made it any less subtle, those bonehead liberals might end up picking up on it and mock the fuck out of it.

But what it really represents is a continuing erosion of the traditional family and, consequently, what is best for children and, therefore, future society.

Ah geeze, lady, I was totally unaware of that dog whistle pumped through the theatre sound system until you spelled it out. Now I have to go back and mock you by ancient Sadly, No! tradition. Which means I’ll have to delete my family’s secret recipe for making Ambrosia on the mortal plain. Thanks a lot, fucker!

Before you reach for the inhaler,

Ah, shit’s getting intense now!

People are getting asthmatic attacks and shit!

Which, yeah, if you’re so worried about that, maybe you should blow the dust off your ancient and archaic assumptions about gender relations and what a family “looks like” before you drop it all over the page. Yanno, maybe…

permit me to introduce a few disclaimers.

Oh, sorry, did I just set up the usual conspiracy theory jamboree more expected of the pages of the American Thinker than the supposedly higher-caliber KAPLAN Test-Prep Post? Whoops. Let me backtrack a little bit and put up a terribly unconvincing pose of giving a fuck about women’s rights and equality.

First, I’m all for women achieving all they can. Obviously, I’m on that treadmill myself. I’ve raised three children while working (mostly self-employed and briefly as a single mom). There is no moisture behind my ears.

Holy fucking shit, Is that…? No. It couldn’t be. But…

Is that a Bob honest acknowledgment by an anti-feminist conservative woman that their career ranting about how all other women should get back in the kitchen and out of the workplace is nonetheless a CAREER?!?

And here I had given up any hope of ever seeing an anti-feminist bother even showing this token acknowledgment of their blatant hypocrisy and the way they’ve taken the fruits of feminist gains while desperately trying to kick over the ladder behind them.

It’s so beautiful… it hurts a little…

Second, women have joined the workforce in greater numbers because they’ve had to, not merely to hear themselves roar, as the Helen Reddy song once described women’s nascent self-realization. Children are expensive and one income seldom suffices. Thanks to the recession, many Americans count themselves lucky if even one member of the household has a job. And a single mother clearly has no other choice, though it is increasingly the case that women choose to be single parents as the biological clock runs down.

And an acknowledgment that modern capitalism just might have a little to do with making it so a two-income household is not just nice, but is a downright necessity in the modern age?

Did I… Did I transport to a magical dimension where conservatives actually acknowledge the reality around them rather than blaming all their issues on whoever’s lower on the hierarchy and trying to make their lives relatively worse? Oh joyous day, we’ll be able to fix so much stuff and-

Nevertheless, trends that diminish the importance of fathers from the family unit cannot — or should not — be celebrated. Contrary to the Hollywood version of single motherhood, a trend that began with Murphy Brown more than 20 years ago, single mothers are more likely to be younger, black or Hispanic, and less educated, according to Pew, and they have a median family income of $23,000. In those families where married women earn more than their husbands, the woman is more often white, older and college educated and the median household income is $80,000.

Conversations the past few days about Pew’s findings have veered toward practical questions of men’s value. During a recent segment on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” guests — all women except Joe Scarborough, who looked sheepish and mostly kept his own counsel — visited the familiar question: Why do women even need men?

Oh right, disingenuous faux-moderate paragraphs having little to nothing to do with the rest of her post…

Well, that’s a load of egg on my face… or at least I hope that’s egg… um, does anyone have a towel?

Sigh, so yeah, it’s been a hard road, brutal and painful, but women are slowly starting to vaguely creep towards equal on a number of issues, though many others are still locked and barred with the brute strength of harassment campaigns, rape threats, and murder. Which of course means, to those heavily invested in the patriarchy, that there needs to be a lot of hand-wringing about whether women even need men, because apparently men are such horrible, useless, vile scum that women would only put up with them if they were forced by a brutal oppressive system of enforced heteronormativity.

Except, only the anti-feminists actually think like that. The rest of us, those mean-nasty feminists and our iron tipped stilettos, like men just fine. Have no trouble considering them equal and full people without reducing them to lodestones or breeding stock. In fact, they love having equal relationships with men whether it be friendship, romantic partnership, or sexual interaction. Because that means that they are treated with respect. Which is also why women with self respect rant so much about sexism and patriarchy in the first place. Because it poisons those positive interactions of people, by insisting on unnecessary enforcements of gender roles that have never fit anyone cleanly (certainly not when it isn’t a choice).

And I feel we can end on that note, having sufficiently mined the humor potential of this here mango river-

The ladies worked earnestly to find positive roles for their hirsute colleagues, noting that men can be useful in family planning, child-care sharing, working as part of a team. Although a man’s presence was implicit in the hypothetical household, I waited futilely for emphasis to shift to the importance of fathers to their children’s well-being.

I…huh? It’s… It’s Morning Joe. No one there has the brainpower of a turnip, why would you even expect? And children’s well-being? The question was some right-wing blather about women needing men, why the fuck would we erase grown men to talk instead about children, unless it is someone actually saying something of use for once and pointing out that households not hung up on bullshit crap about “men and women’s roles” is going to not only be more likely to be loving and supportive, but will be better able to adjust and respond to their children no matter how they end up, whether it be heteronormative stock brokers or quadsexual flubert turnip-twaddlers?

No, not getting sucked back in-

Father, it seems, has become the new F-bomb.

… Which is why a newspaper so stogy and archaic that it can only reference the word “FUCK” with the vocabulary of a 7-year-old can safely write it a few thousand times and post the usual empty-headed “Happy Father’s Day” fluff articles around the site.

Truly, it has become the last of the great taboos.

I saw angry conservatives picketing the local Hallmark because of their offensively informal usage of such a filthy, horrible word and honestly, despite my own lack of respect for tabooed language, I’m hard-pressed to disagree. Fath-that word is just… yeah. No. Just no.

Oh, we’ll say “F#$&” in a 30-Rock second,

Apparently no, no you will not.

but “father”?

Father appears 7 times in her article alone. And that’s specifically the word father. Fuck appears 0 times, but is obliquely referenced at least 3 times, every time with censoring for the “sensibilities” of the types of people who still read the Washington Post (i.e. the type of old people who get angry if you try and remove a comic from the comics page just because the creator died and isn’t producing any new work)…

LOGIC!

The term, along with the concept, seems to have receded from popular usage, displaced by the vernacular of drive-by impregnators, the inane “baby daddy.”

Also, here, did you catch the racist dog-whistle here? I’m just really worried that I’m being too subtle to be understood by my intended audience!

Women, indeed, may not need men, though they seem to want them — at least until the estrogen ebbs.

As a biologist by training, a feminist by living, an asexual by existing, and a taker of estrogen by dysphoria, I would respond to this particular sentence, but I’m a bit distracted by the sudden taste of copper and the blood coming out of my nose. If you’ll excubalabfj-*THUD*

Women have become more self-sufficient (a good thing) and, given that they still do the lion’s share of housework and child rearing, why, really, should they invite a man to the clutter?

*orkorkork* Me agree, filthy man, no is needed, because sexist dismissal and gendered role-distribution of unpaid house and child care work. *orkorkork* Me like happy Parker lady, she supportive of seals like me! *orkorkork* I taste bees!

Because, simply, children need a father.

…

And I’m back. Okay, fine, since this mango seems to be being passed through the large intestines of the wingnutosphere as the “next new hot argument against same-sex marriage, which turns out to be the same rejected argument that’s been laughed out of the room a thousand times before”, let’s give it a good final flushing.

Why?

Why does a child supposedly need a father? For those of you somehow struggling to explain why husbands, why men in the abstract are quote-unquote “necessary”, why are you so certain that fathers are irreplaceable? Do children of lesbian couples grow up completely socially maladjusted and broken? No, no more than the rest of society. If a father is suddenly is struck dead, or ends up transitioning, or otherwise exits the picture, stage right, does the child become subfunctional? Cause, it’s been a number of decades that single mothers have become commonplace, hell, you yourself admitted you were one for awhile. Were your children instantly broken and subfunctional until you could once again yoke yourself into a conservatism approved living arrangement? Were you the most terrible mother on the planet for daring to deprive your children of a father, any father during that time period?

Is this need so great that it nearly anything would be preferable for the child than leaving? That it would be better for the child to stay with someone who raped or abused you? Who hit you in front of them? Who hit them in front of you? Who raped them and abused them and made them want to kill themselves with depression and trauma?

Would it be better for a child to be dead than to be raised by a loving lesbian couple? To be out on the streets, scrounging for a hit, than to be raised by a loving single mother who was willing to stand behind them? To go to bed scared to mention their punctured lung than to live in a household where “daddy” isn’t considered the sole be all and end all of what “makes a family”?

Cause that’s sort of at the crux of this argument, of all arguments about the necessity of fathers as well as the fear that if they aren’t enforced they will become absent.

That father is just like marriage or family or values, another code-word for a broken system where only the “man” of the household got to be the real person and everyone else was just his possessions.

And sadly, that is not the world most of us want to live in anymore. We like having parents who love each other as equals or love themselves as full human beings enough to be single and a parent. We like systems where children can be something other than what their parents want without fear of being disowned, financial penalties, or the loss of their parent’s all-too conditional love. We like the ability of households to find what works for them whether that’s breeding or not, poly or mono or a mix of the two, open and free, or quieter and more reserved.

And maybe that’ll mean a world where fathers aren’t needed, as some patriarchal enforcement of gender roles and hierarchies. But rather one in which men, women, those in the transgender spectrum, and those beautiful fluberts and shlinks, can find their own model where the humanity of all is never in question and nothing is assumed to be one person’s role because…reasons.

Now, I only have two fucks left to give for this overwrought chest-beating, so better make it good.

That not all get a good one is no argument against what is true and irrevocable and everlasting. Deep in the marrow of every human child burbles a question far more profound than those currently occupying coffee klatches: Who is my daddy?

The world is not responsible to your daddy issues. It need not organize itself in convenient patterns so you can work out your fears and sorrows and unprocessed complex emotional reactions surrounding your father. People in it can be sympathetic. Can recommend you take care of yourself and use part of your considerable fortune to get a psychologist to help you and prevent it from being so powerful that it interferes with your job. But we don’t owe those issues anything. And those issues are not the omnipresent reality you assume we share.

Because for most of us, the question “who is your daddy” only ever comes up in a very specific aspect of sexual role-playing, far removed from the mouths of children, we damn well would hope… you creepy pedophile.

And sadly these days, where is he?

Oh sorry, I lied. I ran out of fucks to give a long damn time ago.

And frankly, if you really have been asking that question since you were a kid, then ma’am, respectfully, your “daddy” was never much worth knowing in the first place.

W. Bradford Wilcox*, National Merci Beaucoup:
Happy Fatherless Day

Father’s Day, like Mother’s Day before it, can be a very complex holiday. It can bring joyous thoughts, like thinking of your gay dads and the sunny halcyon days of youth accompanying them to the heterosexual reeducation camp to laugh at the chained up straight people. It can bring painful thoughts, intense triggering, and weeks of sadness even if the monster who abused you as a child is safely buried under the floorboards where he belongs. It can bring absolutely no thoughts whatsoever, an excuse to call home and check in to make sure ones progenitors have not yet shuffled off the mortal coil.

Speaking personally, I know the holiday has become more… interesting, psychologically speaking, given recent events with my own father. But you didn’t tune in to hear about that, but rather how the various dungeon denizens of the right-wing react to this emotionally pregnant (give a pregnant dad a hug) holiday. Well, to really get into it, we must first-

It’s rage and confusion.

Like with every other holiday… or day for that matter, wingnuts have been responding to Father’s Day with unfocused hatred of those they see as transgressing the “natural order” and thus “ruining” their unearned celebrations of being born at the top of the piggy pile.

But hey, I suppose it’s understandable, given that I doubt they receive many calls home from their estranged and terrified children on these days.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Damn bitch dun took my kids… I mean… damn bitches, taking away America’s children and sticking the government with the bill rather than living in abusive cages and worshipping the penile rule of their husband overlords!

Or alternatively:

Verbatim tagline:

• As marriage declines, fewer fathers will have real relationships with their children.

It’s been rather… instructive to watch in real time as the right-wing’s usage of the word “marriage” to mean “enforced patriarchal model of ownership by a husband of his wife and children held in abused terror” has become more and more blindingly obvious as more and more people have begun questioning and poking at this construction.

I mean, they did all right for a time, casually referring to their worries about how divorce might be affecting “marriages” and were “breaking up the family” while everyone nodded their heads and pretended they were speaking a shared language. And there were even a few optimistic souls willing to try and grant some good faith credit to the homophobes freaking out that gay people seeking entry into traditional wedding ceremonies was somehow a threat to marriage.

But at this point, with the social power of conservatives to shame and destroy any woman who dares think of improving her life by dumping an abusive husband or two Arabic men who dare dream of the picket-fence fantasy conservatives reserved for white straights only at an absolute nadir, the masks have quickly come off in last-ditch efforts hoping to remind the world to crawl back in its cage and forget the last 50+ years ever happened.

Needless to say… it’s not going particularly well for the forces of marriage as ownership model.

Today, marriage is less likely to ground and guide American family life.

For instance, here we see the dog whistle turned up so loud and low-pitched that passing ships can easily mistake it for a foghorn.

The recent response from the left to the nation’s retreat from marriage is instructive.

…

I’m only expecting wonderful things from a setup like this. One sec. Popcorn acquired and…

Proceed.

Just “live with it,” says sociologist Philip Cohen in The Atlantic. Ezra Klein assures us in the Washington Post that as marriage breaks down, “space will emerge for a more practical conversation about how to best support America’s increasingly nontraditional family units.” And Matthew Yglesias notes in Slate that the Left sees an “expansive welfare state” as the primary vehicle for supporting unmarried women and their children.

You may notice that there are no sections of hyperlinked text in that paragraph. Nor were there any in the original post.

That may very well be because even dapper Southern dandy W. Bradford Wilcox the improbably unnumbered understands the considerable risk of getting that concentration of potent anti-fact even remotely close to the fact-infested general surroundings of reality. Like all true scientists working with anti-fact, he knows the importance of working in a hermetically sealed environment where the anti-facts can be safely experimented with and propogated. Luckily for him, the lands where J-Load is considered a “deep and important” figure serve as the perfect testing environment.

So it’s not egregious misquoting and partial quoting, attempts to use translations of dog whistles to make it seem like reasonable statements were universal calls to arms, and a nudging “wink wink” elbow in the eye to the non-nuclear family family structures that used to make up the vast majority of familial models until very reasonably.

It’s just a scientist being careful with a volatile sample… of stupid.

Doesn’t that make you feel so much better?

It’s debatable whether the nation has the money, the ability, or the political will to launch new government programs and initiatives dedicated to “supporting America’s increasingly nontraditional family units.” I certainly have my doubts. But at least the Left is honest enough to recognize that less marriage means more government.

It’s almost cute in a way to see him try and run with his little weaselly football into the end zone, unaware that he’s playing on a European football field, wasn’t invited, and is actually completely naked with a ferret attached to his scrotum.

No, see, Matt Yglesias totally said that “nonmarried” people were those welfare queens we so hate and are totes responsible for all that government waste we are assuming that one of the few things with a net positive effect on the economy is. And because he assumed that, we can assume we can’t afford to take care of those bitchy moochers who dare try and live without their husbands income. YOU’RE NOT GETTING ONE RED CENT, MARGARET! Er… uh, BIG GOVERNMENT! Fear response! Fear response! Fear government actually doing something to positively affect people’s lives rather than existing solely as a terrifying Big Brother apparatus built to artificially prolong the coercive power of a broken form of capitalism and half-hearted attempts to enforce the status quo through police state mechanisms. Um…

Oh, mah darling Bradford, no. It’s okay, but… sadly, no.

However, most proponents of the “live with it” approach conveniently ignore, or are in complete denial about, the most fundamental consequence of the American retreat from marriage: growing rates of fatherless families. In our public conversation about how best to accommodate today’s family diversity, what usually goes unsaid is that fewer marriages also means fewer fathers in our nation’s homes.

You know what?

Fuck it. I’m going to try and read this as if it actually was a good faith argument and statement about marriage and not the single most transparent attempt to freakout over the death of the patriarchal model of “Father Knows Best” sitcom fairy tales of what a “father” is “supposed” to mean if you uppity little snot-nosed brats know what’s good for you (and yeah, in retrospect, the bizarre little interlude he did with K-lo suddenly makes a lot more fucking sense).

Let’s begin. Oh noes! He’s right! No one is talking about how fewer marriages means fewer fathers! And fewer mothers too! Because they are real human beings rather than fleeting possessions men use to brag about their masculinity and virility with each other! This pat truism devoid of any actual useful meaning (if you have less money in your bank account and look at it in terms of danish kroner, you still have less money! Oh shock of shocks) sure isn’t at all pointless nothing without a firm understanding of what “traditional marriage” actually means to the professional homophobe crowd!

… Hmm, this task may be more difficult than I previously suspected.

That is because marriage is the institution that binds men to their children. There is no substitute.

Speaking of difficulty.

It’s actually rather important that wingnuts take the time from time to time to really… hammer home what they are getting at. Due to the divide and conquer and gish-gallop argumentation styles that are the right-wing’s stock and trade, it can become a little too easy to become enmeshed in one single bad-faith argument or target of hatred and forget the wider web at work.

By which I mean, it can be easy when focusing on the various bad-faith arguments made about “marriage” with regards to gay rights to forget that the various wingnuts have never gotten over their intense hatred for those uppity bitches who dared shirk their rightful duties to marry young and unhappily settling for whatever man would validate them and “care for them into their old age”. Nor also those even more uppity bitches who would even consider a marriage something one could exit if it didn’t make those within it happy.

And finally, the “parent’s rights” fury at how the society turned all pussy on them and how the government got into the business of actually investigating abusive households and those which viewed the children as the rightful property of the father to use, abuse, and discard as he saw fit and standing up for the rights of children as fully born humans themselves.

Which is also tied to why they constantly try and equate fetuses and tiny clumps of cells as fully born women and children, but that’s a separate rant and I’ve probably already moved too far off topic and contemplative already. So let’s see if we can’t mine some actual funny out of this fucker.

Cohabiting couples with children are much more likely to end up on the rocks than their married peers (even in Sweden). Divorced and never-married fathers often have difficulty getting or making the time to stay in regular contact with their children once the relationship with the mother of their child is over. By contrast, fathers who are married to the mother of their children are much more likely to enjoy the day-in-day-out relationships with their children that enable them to give their kids the attention, discipline, and affection they need to thrive.

Pfft… Ask and ye shall receive.

I’m sorry, but it is truly hilarious the way these patriarchal fuckstains whine about how their all-mighty right to own their wife and children shaped property has been stolen away then try and turn away and use their successes to claim sudden victimhood at their wayward property’s hands.

You have fought over countless centuries to ensure an oppressive system where child care was assumed to be solely women’s work, something beneath men and unworthy of time, attention, focus, or matter, something so crucial that even as you lose the war over women having the right to a career, to control over her own fertility, and slowly to being treated as full human beings rather than sex dispensaries, it is still a strong cultural expectation that the woman take the lion’s share of child care responsibilities so that the man only need enjoy the pleasant aspects of children after his “long day” at work.

And now, you whine when that enforcement means that when your wayward property has had enough of being treated like an abused house slave, they are considered the parent most closely connected with the child because they have been. Because they have been forced into that role by the social power you have exerted over them in hopes that it would drain them from any thoughts of escape or equality.

And it’s even more hilarious to note that it’s simplicity itself for this problem to be fixed. If these “marriage warriors” were even slightly honest in their desires to fix this problem, they could simply stop enforcing artificial divides, participate equally in housework and child care, and stop blocking feminist attempts to open up abilities for men to be primary child care or extensions of parental leave programs to include male-identified parents.

Or even more simply, just giving a fuck about the kids as something more than a tool to hurt one’s malfunctioning lovedoll. Yeah, as a child of a single mother for many years, I didn’t at all miss the little glossing over there of the fact that many “fathers” don’t have a relationship with their kids because they simply didn’t want one. They didn’t want to actually spend time day to day raising their children and cutting into their assumed leisure and work time. Or pay their dues in supporting their wife and kids in child support. Or treat their kids and wife with any of the human dignity they deserve.

Seriously, assorted MRA and MRA-lite douchebags, the “courts” would side with you a hell of a lot more, if you weren’t so trans-fucking-parent about only giving a damn about custody and “where’s the father in all this” when you see it as a tool of trying to bully the mother back into her “place”.

*And suddenly I’m twelve years old again… hee hee “Will Cocks”…

**BONUS POST:

Craig Groeschel, Fox “News” .com:
Things to Fight for this Father’s Day

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Pussy ass queer faggot lovers whining about “bullying” and “unchecked violence propogated by our unhealthy obsession with toxic masculinity” are distracting us and feminizing us from the true lesson fathers should be instilling in their boys. How to be angry and violent at everything and anything weaker than you in service to an ideal of masculinity based around using violence to avoid looking “feminine”! So go fight something, unless you want to be considered a pussy woman creature.

Oh yes. Indeed. And despite the fact that it’s pretty much one single idea repeated so ad nauseam it actually can make you physically nauseous, it nonetheless has some priceless mangos, such as:

I read a book recently that suggested our culture has tried to turn good men into women—nicer, softer, kinder, more compassionate and fashion savvy. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but men are not women. (For the record, women don’t make good men, either.)

I read it! In a book!

Being a true warrior is about knowing the source of true strength. It’s about knowing your own weaknesses and turning to God to empower you to be the man he made you to be.

Oh the ways in which the macho he-man values of 80s action stars and the more humble “give your ass to God” sentiments of Christian authoritarianism completely fail to mesh will never cease to be hilarious to me.

Maybe you’re thinking, I don’t know, Craig. I’m a laid-back dude, peaceful, live and let live. I’m not really into the whole fight club scene. “Call of Duty’s” an awesome video game, but actually, I don’t even know if I know how to fight.

…

Totes manly, dude. Totally will disguise the desperate overcompensation and your pants-shitting terror at being considered less than masculine by the abusive system you’re desperately propping up if you praise a video game where you shoot imaginary terrorists, conveniently color-coded, and where bullet-wounds only give you raspberry jam disease instead of actually joining the global conflict you armchair warriored actual poor desperate kids into fighting and dying and suffering untold numbers of psychological health issues on your behalf.

I… I’m not going to top that.

Maybe your kids are making dangerous decisions. Get down on your knees and fight like a man of faith!

Then again…

Draw a line in the sand. Make your enemy pay: Don’t cross a warrior. Don’t mess with this man of God. Come out fighting.

And when you fight—don’t fight clean. Use the weapons God gave you, and you’ll win in more ways than you could imagine. Can you feel it? It’s inside you.

It’s time to fight like a man.

They can’t even fantasize about a fair fight.

But still, useful advice nonetheless. Go out there, Sadly Noizens!, and celebrate Father’s Day like a MAN! Which I can only assume involves punching him in the crotch and running away.

I didn’t realize you could use “I’m rubber and you’re glue” defenses for violations of civil rights.

James Lewis, American Reactionary:
The Totalitarian Left is Back

The right-wing is starting to glaze over a little bit. They’ve been whipped into such a forthy santorum over so much tightly-packed shit that all the posts are essentially interchangeable.

It’s all “Blah blah blah, I’m shocked to find gambling going on here at this casino, blah blah blah, WAH! Minor non-incidents are so much worse than the fact that we regularly ran torture prisons for the better part of a decade, blah blah blah, I hate black people and can’t believe one was elected for two terms…. I mean something about Obama being Hitler because Hitler has become a stand-in ‘bad guy’ completely removed from his actual ideology and crimes…”

So it’s always a shock to filter through the endless repeats and find an argument that is… if not novel, certainly of a greater blatancy than I’ve grown accustomed to from the record-skipping hordes.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• So, when we went to go yell at the filthy liberals for not agreeing that the president is a NI-CLANG because of his continuation of Bush era surveillance-state policies, they laughed at us, pointed to our complete lapdog approval of the installation of such a state, and then reminded us that we called them treasonous anti-American bastards for daring to point out that such a system would have long term consequences we ourselves might not enjoy if a Democratic president came to pass…

  Well… uh…

  NUH UH! Obama installed all of the Bush-era abuses of power! WAH! Mommy, make them stop giving us credit for the successes we no longer want credit for! WAH!

Yes, really:

But this is of course a lie. Nothing in the Patriot Act authorizes the government-wide abuse of power by the IRS, EPA, FBI, DOJ, and other agencies with the coercive powers against Americans and foreigners.

For every paragraph:

Contrary to the last desperate defense spun by the Times, the Bush Administration never abused the press immunities of reporters; it never used the IRS to initiate hostile investigations of its domestic political enemies, no matter how poisonous and hateful those enemies became;

EVERY paragraph:

Moreover, Republicans never publicly wish for one-party rule in the United States,

And yes, where the paragraphs aren’t laughably ignorant of VERY recent history (sharing the usual strategy among right-wing writers of pretending they were in an 8 year long coma during the Bush-years they spent masturbating so hard to unrestrained authoritarian power they gave their dick blisters), they are FULL of IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION, complete failures to understand what “totalitarian” means, the usual shout-outs to J-Load’s Liberal Fascism (which may very well have surpassed The Bible at this point in terms of holy books for right-wing assholes), and of course, a delicious smoothie of all the various right-wing conspiracies that could fit in the blender (the world’s scientists are all in on a scam to invent the idea of global warming? Check. FDR was a Stalinist? Check check. Obama is a secret muslim foreigner without a birth certificate? Check check check! Saul Alinksy?!? OH GOD YES, CHECK ME HARDER!).

Fuck, he even managed to fit in a reference to Journolist for Bob’s sake? Who here even fucking remembers that storm in a teakettle?

It’s like the whole hurricane of fail the right-wing blogosphere has been trying to swing over Washington DC all wrapped up in a tiny package with a pretty little bow made out of human entrails and feces.

And as an empathetic woman, I’ve got to say to the right-wing moguls who have been driving this little hurricane into being… Stop.

Stop demanding your broken stable of schizophrenics and shut-ins keep up this cycle of overblown hypocrisy and scandal-manufacturing. It’s quite clear that they simply can’t take the strain. The repetition is breaking them in half and as a dedicated snarkmistress, set upon the sculpted archway to harvest their sorrows, I cannot help but feel their pain. They’ve forgotten what they were supposed to care about when and what they were supposed to yell about and all that left is this plaintive wail for help.

Have sympathy, dear shitmongers, and pity for your poor subjects.

Because they clearly have no idea of what they do at this point.

*Addendum: Yes, of course, the continuation of these policies is a terrible thing, but considering that not a damn one of these authority-worshiping lackwits gave a single damn about any of this before they were told to grasp onto anything they can in order to sell a media narrative about Obama being worse than Nixon, you’ll forgive me if I don’t pretend to take the right-wing’s performance of shock and shame as anything other than the kabuki theater it is. And further forgive me if I don’t pretend that said kabuki will do a damn thing to advance the currently running movements seeking a real improvement in the shitty spy-happy/Big-Brother-state status quo.

Herbert E. Meyer, American Deep Thinker:
The Smoking Gun in Plain Sight

Shorter:

• I’m not saying that Obama is Hitler… only that Obama is Hitler.

No… really. The entire post is full of lofty expansive verses about how only the most scum-sucking of bottom feeders and conspiracy theory junkies could ever even entertain the notion that Obama’s presidency and the reign of the Fuhrer of Nazi Germany could in any way be equivalent before just straight up borrowing the fear response of the comparison to demonize Obama.

Don’t trust me? Well, okay…

Reader, take a deep breath. Nowhere in this essay will I suggest, or even imply, that President Obama plans the mass murder of his opponents the way Hitler murdered his. That’s absurd. I am merely pointing out that President Obama has been going about the business of demonizing his political enemies, and then hiring thugs to destroy them without regard to the law, in precisely the same way that Hitler and his fascists did it in Germany. This isn’t an accusation; it’s an observation.

Always trust the motherfucking shorter!

Bonus mango?

Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council.

We live in a true meritocracy.

Ben “The Loneliest Virgin You Will Ever Know” Shapiro, Andrew Breitbart is still Dead.com:
Children’s Network Launches Transsexual Superhero Show

Sonuvabitch!

Do you have any idea how many back alley blowjobs and secret cabal meetings went into this project to turn kids trans* by exposing them to the existence of trans* people in one single cartoon show on a struggling channel? All that effort to conceal the many-hands of the Illuminati’s George Soros funding and BAM, we get rumbled by the super-duper sleuths at Team “Breitbart’s Star is going to carry us home” and their unthinkable concept of obsessively following children’s entertainment news in hopes of overblowing something into a full-blown hissy-fit.

Fuck, if only it weren’t for the steely-eyed talents like Ben “Failed Lawyer and Collapsing Empire Inheritor” Shapiro, we really could have reached the 10-15 kids who would have stumbled onto the show normally.

And then, the hypnoscreens would kick in and BAM, they’d be infected with… liberal ideas like “trans* people are human beings” and “I shouldn’t make fun of people just because I perceive them as wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes”.

And then where would be as a society? Cities would fall, mothers would grow sterile, the whole world would be enveloped in unending night. But now, nope, boring old 24 hour cycles… no thanks to Shitbeard here. It just makes me so angry, you know?

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Perceived trannies, bad! Gender Enforcement, good! Trannies, ewwwww.

So apparently, the right wing noise machine took a break from repeating the words Benghazi over and over again in order to react like scared meerkats to the picking up of a little known Australian superhero cartoon to little known television channel “The Hub” (apparently it is the current home of internet-sensation “My Little Ponies: Friendship is Magic”).

According to them, it is the reason that the skies are as liquid fire right now, because this little known Australian superhero cartoon, contains…

A TRANSSEXUAL SUPERHERO!

Which, every newscaster and right wing pundit worth their salt has been clear to emphasize is a vile and disgusting idea on its very face and proof that the entire world has lost its collective mind to think that’s even something remotely okay to show to children, our most precious resources (and thanks on that by the way, makes me feel real damn welcome on this planet).

Now of course, the creator has been very quick to jump into the press and reassure everyone that the sky isn’t actually falling and that his cartoon’s titular character SheZow is in no way a freaky-ass transsexual (so very welcome). Instead that the main character Guy is stuck with a Green Lantern/Captain Marvel style power that dresses him in feminine clothing and crappy 60s era ultrafeminine powers he does not at all like. Which honestly, is a pretty interesting commentary on sexism in comics and how things get gendered and the pressures placed on one gender or the other to perform a parody of gender roles to “fit in”.

Having watched the first episode (for free on the Hub’s website), as well as an analysis by The Escapist’s Movie Bob, it’s hardly the life-destroying monstrosity or first great trans* series it could have been.

Overall, it’s an alright cartoon, limited by stock characters, lowered ambition, and an over-reliance on terrible puns (which is why I think the comment thread here will probably love it (oh, you know I’m right)). While the creator stresses how very not transgendered his show is, there are actually some parallels, like the dysphoric reaction the main character has to their appearance and life as this alter-ego intended for girls, fears of coming out to or being outted to his family for his crime-fighting persona, as well as the simple fact that being a transvestite or cross-dresser has always been one of those things that has been debated back and forth over whether it belongs in the greater transgender family or not (personally, I strongly favor yes, but others, most notably usually drag performers and crossdressers, argue no as a result of their gender-non-conformity being a temporary performance).

Certainly the creator is right in that the main character “Guy” is not presented as transsexual (someone, who in the course of their life, is transitioning between sexes, also known as the thing most people end up focusing on when discussing transgender issues in general).

More’s the pity.

And speaking of pity, let’s tune back to the squad of failures and janitors left behind to turn off the lights on Breitbart’s rusty old basement.

Nothing says “child-appropriate material” quite like gender-bending underage superheroes.

Why?

No, really, why?

Why is it automatically assumed that knowledge of the existence of trans* people must be child-inappropriate. Must be to such a degree that penny-ante gobshites like Ben Shapiro feel free assuming it without a single never mind.

Cause I’ve never really understood it. I mean, I’ve been affected by the assumption that trans* equals sex equals hide from children. It’s been the subject of confused and hurtful emails from family members. It’s been the subtext of the discrimination I’ve faced at my job. And the subtext of the discrimination my trans* friends have faced in similar jobs connected with the education of children. It’s been the text of frantic cries that people like me can’t be allowed to use their public restrooms…

Cause in my experience, those kids could do with some trans* people in their fiction. Trans* people exist in society, and whether they are serving as teachers, parents, adults, future lovers, the kids at their school, or even themselves, they will probably encounter at least one before they die just by happenstance. And for those kids, it would help to see that a trans* person is still a person, can even be a hero. Especially for those kids who are trans* and already know they are trans* and could use a hero that they can look up to and remember when things get tough. It could be the only thing that carries them through a hard day or a hard year or a hard life…

And suddenly, I think I grasp the why. Because if we acknowledge the humanity of some filthy trannies, then who will we turn to when we want to feel bigger than someone simply for being born the way we are, what with the meanie liberals taking away all the other toys away? And if we don’t teach kids to carefully hate, teach trans* kids that they are to be hated, then the same thing that has happened to gay rights will happen for trans* rights and no one will cheer us on for kicking the easy target and enforcing that artificial gender binary.

What a shame for them that trans* people aren’t going away, aren’t retreating back into closets, and the next generation doesn’t seem to understand why they’re supposed to hate some sad-eyed person just trying to live their lives as best they can over some rules that don’t make much sense to begin with.

I’d cry for them, but sadly, as a trans* individual, my cold robotic heart is incapable of your filthy human emotions (yes, operation pretend to be human is going splendidly, none will ever know the truth, muahaha!).

At least that’s the theory over at the Hub, the network co-owned by Discovery and Hasbro, which is trotting out its latest soon-to-be-dud, SheZow.

It must be a thrilling existence, being able to waste so many thousands on law school to spend one’s days looking at a children’s television show list and screaming at cartoons to fail in order to feel like one has made a difference.

Must make those sexless nights feel vindicated, yeah? Like you really accomplished something meaningful?

Definitely.

That show follows the adventures of a 12-year-old boy named Guy who uses a magic ring to transform himself into a crime-fighting girl.

Or rather dress him in a stereotypically feminine outfit, but let’s ignore that little bit of bus dodging and focus on the sharp little dog-whistle of 12-year-old.

Because clearly, being 12 is a horrifying age at which to understand that trans* people exist or that feminine clothing can be worn by a guy, because obviously trans* people = sex = pedophilia = catholic church scandal = 30 year old virgins who spend their nights watching children’s television and scowling (I mean, fuck dude, at least find some goddamned enjoyment in watching something not intended for your age group if you’re going to put yourself through this again and again).

Of course, in our boring old grey reality, 12 is a really important age for a lot of transsexuals (specifically). That cusp of hormones, where you’re just on this side of puberty is a great time for a transsexual with supportive parents to figure out they’re transsexual by, because it can save a lifetime of pain by going through the correct puberty instead of having to backtrack later and try a redo like the rest of us.

It can help one’s body be more reliably accurate to one’s internal sex and save the kid a lot of dysphoria, pain, and suffering. And ideas that 12 is “too young” to really be talking about that sort of thing is the prime reason that puberty for a lot of transsexuals is most remembered as “that time they first tried to commit suicide”.

But that all aside, boys and girls being in the other gendered clothes is not at all a “new” concept for 12 year olds either. In fact, it takes a lot of careful social lessons by freaking out adults to “train” kids on the very concept that clothes have a “gender” and are “for” one group or the other (unt only VUN group or the other, sorry fluberts and other assorted genderqueer scum).

Yes, you read that correctly. When Guy says the magic words – “You go girl!” – he becomes SheZow, wearing a purple skirt and cape, as well as pink gloves and white boots.

In the time of kings, purple was a color of royalty. The finest kings donned themselves in purple to a degree that would have made Prince blush. In millennia past, the skirt was a warrior’s regalia, an important part of Greek and Roman armor in a tradition still carried to this day in the heritage outfits of the Scots. Up until the 40s, pink was a color for boys because it was related to red, the color of blood and fiery passion, whereas light blue was seen as the serene, calming color of little girls. And white boots? What, are you so terrified of sex that even mentioning that those boots are high heels throws you into shock? What a frightened, blue-swathed baby.

But history lessons aside, yes, that’s the point. That the stereotypically feminine outfit and all the sad pathetic powers often afforded to female superheroines including “makeup accessories that turn into weapons” have been given to a person who wants the power but not the girlyness. It’s actually a pretty clever way of critiquing the shitty choices often facing young girls who are often handed a less shiny version of an awesome thing, festooned in bright pink and made to look like something they may very well hate based on adult ideas of what “they’d like”.

It’s an interesting idea and it’s sad that freakouts like this one by Ben Shapiro will probably keep it from going much further into it than endless puns based around the word “she”.

The chief executive of the Hub, who may or may not have been high

POT BAD!

(and leftist)

LEFTISTS BAD!

when she greenlit this project, is Margaret Loesch.

WOMEN BAD! ME HATE WOMEN SO MUCH! WAAAAHHH! Why won’t they sleep with me? MOMMMMEEEEE, make them sleep with me and stop getting boner-killing jobs ruining America with their unapproved cartoon cooties. I want He-Man back so I can masturbate to it… I mean, appreciate it’s totally not homoerotic undertones… Shut up!

Loesch commented, “When I first heard about the show, my reaction was ‘Are you out of your minds?’ Then I looked at it and I thought, ‘This is just funny.’”

And I do so enjoy being the punchline simply by existing.

And you might rightly say, Cerberus, you stone cold fox, she was actually saying that the show itself and its clever use of “she” puns is just funny, to which… okay, yeah, you’re probably right…

Which is probably why Ben thought fit to include at the bottom of his little hate screed an example of the average television handling of the subject, complete with disbelieving Morning Show Stepford Bot host laughing herself hoarse at the very concept of a transgendered superhero, because trans* people, instant punchline, right?

There is no eye socket large enough for the eye rolling motion that’s in my heart right now…

The target audience for the Hub is children aged two to eleven.

EEEEEE! Little children! Being aware of things we’d prefer they were ignorant about! Maybe thinking that it’s actually okay for a boy to wear a skirt without being less of a man! EEEEEE!

Fear response! It’s different! Snuff it, snuff it, snuff it!

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America”

But see, it’s totally different when we react in constant fear to the existence of people different than us and seek to intimidate them into silence. Because… uh… reasons that surely are not at all IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION!

MEMO TO ALL READERS: For those who didn’t read last post’s comments, I have created a new email account: cerberussadlyno at gmail dot com.

If you have a concern or our banned stalker troll is mucking up the threads and needs to be slopped out again? Feel free to contact me at the email address and I’ll pop over as soon as I can to muck shit up or deal with it.

Responses may not be perfect. I do still have work and life, but hopefully it will help avoid crap like happened on the thread before last.

MEMO 2: We’re going to have a new writer joining the front page soon, but I’ll let them introduce themselves when they do their first post after we finish getting them set up. So be sure to welcome them when that happens.

MEMO 3: For those thinking of mango-diving into the comments… WHY?

MEMO 4: Tell Christine that we’ll have to cancel all further indoctrination activities until the eagle eyes at Breitbart’s empire of Super Journalists are dismantled. They’re just too powerful for us to defeat head-on!

Jim Hoft, Outhouse Pundit:
Air Force Removes Inspirational Painting With Bible Verse From Dining Hall – Atheists Found It “Repugnant”

Am I the only one tired of the latest carousel of made-up “scandals” from the right complete with calls for impeachment/public execution for Obama? All the various fainting couch addicts flinging themselves this way and that trying to pretend that having the IRS vaguely look in the direction of rich billionaire pet projects whose only coherent public opinion is that taxes are evil and shouldn’t be paid is a bad thing. Or that Benghazi is an… anything? Or that one random AP reporter getting spied on is somehow the worst government overreach ever with apparently no irony awareness of the Bush years and how every left-of-Rush-Limbaugh group larger than 2 people had to endure constant governmental harassment and tapped phones or how loudly the right cheered it all on when it was happening to the “right people”?

Maybe it’s because I’m one of those “little people” facing those meaningless little “real problems” that the powers that be refuse to even address because a bought-and-sold media wants to fill all the air time with made-up horseshit, but I just can’t be arsed to give one single fuck.

And damn me to hell if I’m going to waste my time refuting something they don’t really care about other than a test run to see if they can besmirch the scandal-less by screaming fake scandals as loudly and constantly as they can.

So I won’t. Today’s post will instead be about a very serious issue. Something worthy of time and attention.

And it has to do with the atheist community. No, not about the way that women have been treated by major leaders in the atheist community, making many skeptical or atheist spaces inhospitable to women. Nor is it about the rape threat and harassment campaigns many atheist women have received from so-called atheist allies who find the idea of applying skepticism to patriarchal ideas on gender. Or anything silly and frivolous like that.

No, it’s about how mean and oppressive atheists have been to that most oppressed and downtrodden of groups… evangelical Christians.

In this case, by attacking a work simply for being inspirational and wonderful and inspirational.

Or at least, I must assume it’s inspirational, seeing as how that word is used about 3 times in a post that barely manages to make it up to 3 sentences.

Well, with a setup like that, let’s not waste time trying to make things shorter, let’s dive in and see this vile overreach for ourselves.

The US Air Force removed an inspirational painting from a dining hall after atheists found it repugnant.

Scandalous and terrible! I mean, I know I hate those “hang in there kitty” posters as much as anyone else with taste, but still, making the poor pitiful, completely without power, Air Force tear it down with their atheist ninjitsu? Wow!

…

As a pure curiosity, what perchance did said “inspirational” poster look like? Did you happen to have a picture we could use as reference or…

Oh you did? Fantastic!

…

That’s a picture of a crusader.

No, really.

Here, see for yourself:

Because really, what speaks to our proud heritage of just defensive wars than fetishizing a racist campaign of genocide practiced by the worst rapists, murderers, and thieves Europe could get rid of?

After complaints from atheists the Air Force removed an inspirational piece of artwork proclaiming the message of Matthew 5:9 in Wagon Wheel dining hall at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho.
The atheists were offended.

The atheists were offended? The atheists needed to be offended?!? Anyone with a pair of eyes and even an ounce of morality left in their spleen should have been offended! It’s equating your military duty with violent sociopaths engaging in a campaign of genocide against the Middle East while you are currently enmeshed in two wars in the Middle East!

And that’s before we get into that gag worthy use of “blessed are the peacemakers” as if Crusaders were not the very embodiment of the opposite!

I… Sigh… if this is the caliber of shit we’re dealing with, it’s going to be a long summer indeed.

Daren Jonescu, here being “oppressed” by young educated whipper snappers

Daren Jonescu, American Wannabe Gangstas:
Winning the Long War

It is often a tiny comfort for those struggling for justice, equality, the right to eat, etc… that the hard stone of their cell walls will eventually shatter if they and everyone they know endlessly throw their face at it for the rest of their lives and beyond. That this process, more often than not, has one ending which is eventually, belatedly, realized though the path to it is arduous and depressingly long, has become the source of many pat truisms.

And having been so shortened, I suppose it was only a matter of time before conservatives noticed and reacted the same way they do when anything is uttered from the mouth of a commie hippie liberal rat bastard.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• They say the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice… Well, fuck! C’mon everybody, brainstorming time on how to put a stop to that shit!

And since conservatives don’t waste any opportunities to air their various issues surrounding toxic masculinity when they are reflexively rejecting the notion of growing and accepting the liberally-biased world around them, his post also serves as a repository for all sorts of ill-thought war and heroes imagery and metaphors for his anti-reality screed.

For example:

Imagine trying to fight a war against an enemy led by ruthless tyrants, while granting that enemy authority to train your own military. After all, you reason, sending your soldiers to the enemy’s training centers frees up your time and resources for other priorities. Moreover, the tyrants have graciously promised to train your men in good faith, so denying them this privilege might seem ungrateful.

Turgid is both an apt description of his “big words will make me seem smart” prose and the state of his no doubt very large and not at all compensated for cock.

Seriously, I wonder how many unnecessary wars, unhelpful “war on x” style campaigns, and overall stress we could save ourselves if we just paid a little extra to get every conservative a subscription to hotmilitarystuds.com, some therapy for their size and masculinity issues, and if we just took the wannabe macho culture out back and shot it in the fucking head.

But leaving that aside and focusing entirely on the world presented in Daren’s pathetic analogy (oh don’t worry, it will get worse), what exactly would Daren’s ideal solution to that problem be? Military training socialism? I mean, if Johnny Dickweasel didn’t want to actually train their military or know anything about tactics, but just wanted to bitch about how Sun Tzu is Maoist propaganda, then he damn well deserves the flattening he’s about to receive.

Same with all the conservatives seeing the arc of history bend away from them and crying foul. Sorry, dipshits, if you didn’t want to end up on the wrong side… AGAIN, then maybe you should have used the many, MANY years you had to jump to the right side.

And in case, you don’t quite believe me that this is what he is bitching about, he makes it painfully clear soon enough.

Civilization — all of it — is currently under the domination of progressive collectivism in ethics, authoritarianism in politics, irrationalism in epistemology, and nihilism in metaphysics.

Yup, we’re so unbelievably vile that we’ve taken over what is ethical, what is right in politics, what is reality, and the metaphysics of the universe itself.

They’re not just upset that reality has a liberal bias, they’re pissed that EVERY method of deriving truth has a liberal bias. And this is of course our fault for being so Satanic.

No, really.

The architects of this calamity have paved the road to the devil’s dominion over several generations. Their recent boldness, moving in for the kill on the last, crumbling bastion of principled resistance, America, shows that they believe ultimate victory is at hand, which, in human terms, means we face a thousand years of darkness.

Hey, it’s not our fault that Satan is so damn sexy. (He’s the ultimate bad boy).

We who reject the progressives’ knee-jerk historicism, however, need not accept the inevitability of this result.

We who reject history can also reject the reality of repeating it!

Take that George Santayana!

And yeah, his overwrought “I need to pump up a half page of thought into a 10 page term paper” style is driving me crazy, so we’re going to jump around a little bit to get to the actual morsels of… no, thought would be giving it WAY too much credit.

The first step to mounting an effective defense is to understand how progressivism has won so much territory, geographical and spiritual, over this multi-generational war.

Well, then I guess you’re fucked then Daren-boy, now ain’t you?

For “civilization” — literally “the process of civilizing men,” or the society resulting from this process — is, as Allan Bloom observed a generation ago, just another word for education.

Civilizing women, on the other hand, comes from the old English word: “Patriarchal oppression”… wait, no, whoops, I meant that they are not even worth considering. Ha, much better.

And yes, having decided that reality and history’s liberal bias is a Satanic plot to make him look like a complete asshole (because he is), he’s decided to take it out on the very idea of learning anything about how reality works. Apparently because reality is like a T-rex and won’t bother existing around you if you keep real still and avoid acknowledging its happening.

Oh wait, no, no that will still get you fucking eaten. Well, better luck next time, the reincarnation center is on the right and don’t forget to tip your Buddha on the way out.

And they have every reason for faith in their scheme, as they have been successfully training generations of men for such gradual submission for more than a century, at public expense no less.

Yes… It totally was the progressives who demanded that education be run similar to the factory system complete with bells and useless memorization. Also, totally the ones who pitch a fit when a teacher tries to educate students to ask hard questions of their beliefs and think critically about challenging materials…

Oh, IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION, how would we light our homes without you?

Public schools undermine — and are intended to undermine — the attachment to private family, by draining most of a child’s energy and attention into a world unrelated to home; by forcibly creating an alternative social universe that engenders attachments rivalling those to parents and siblings; and by teaching children implicit and explicit moral lessons over the heads of their parents, lessons that may stand in direct defiance of the parents’ beliefs. The public school, which is to say the state, becomes the highest moral authority in the child’s life, the ultimate arbiter of truth, the child’s primary social realm, and hence the main source of the foundational states of character that will guide his future choices and inclinations.
The inherent impulse of public education towards increased school hours, increased high school completion rates, and “universal preschool” is not an impulse towards more learning, but rather towards less. More time in the abstract world of aimless, collective childhood means less time developing practical skills, private interests, and personal motivations that might have made a young person’s future more fulfilling, more exceptional, certainly freer — and more independent, confident, and self-reliant.

It’s worth noting here that his solution is quite literally to pull a Huck Finn’s dad and yank dem kids out of their schoolin’ when they start to know more than their ignorant as shit abusive ass parents. Because they are literally arguing that knowing about the world, knowing how it works, and having access to information that is not from pre-approved “worldview appropriate” sources is equivalent to the greatest evils that mankind could ever know.

He is literally saying that knowledge is evil and that we must deny our children that knowledge so a bunch of dumbshit denialist dickschnauzers can keep pretending the world works the way THEY want it to work.

As an educator, this attitude is not just appalling, a vile abuse of children, and a willful ignorance it is not possible to respect, but also an EVIL. It is downright evil to deny kids knowledge because you don’t want them to call you out on your bullshit. Because you want to keep living in a fantasy kingdom and they’re “ruining” it for you by knowing things.

You didn’t have to turn out ignorant. You can at any time, pick up a book and learn how the world works and actually tailor your beliefs to that.

But you didn’t and now the rest of the world is moving on without you, adding the previous generation’s knowledge to the next and you’re trying to trip kids along the track because you’re worried that THEY might make you look bad. There is a vile cowardice here that is simply unforgivable in the extreme.

Compulsory schooling, masked as humanitarianism, was the single most essential coercive act required to achieve their long-term goals.

And you demonstrate why compulsory schooling is necessary and worth protecting into the modern day. Authoritarians of the previous generation will come up with any trick to deny the next the knowledge that has come to pass, to try and keep them ignorant and pliable so they can be used and abused and spat out again. Compulsory education and people willing to further educate them about all the reality that compulsory education tries to hide out of fear of those authoritarian assholes, is necessary to help those children escape the cycle of ignorance and abuse these sick bastards would trap them in.

Willfully miseducating them because of a false belief that denial will actually change the world and make it go blissfully back to a past that never was where minorities shut up and stayed quiet, all meaningful activities were done by rich kings and everyone knew their place and that “deserving” people’s places were naturally higher is just…

Sigh, par for the course for these wingnut assholes.

First, accept the obvious: there is no general will in a society grounded in government schools for undoing compulsory indoctrination immediately. We must therefore learn the most valuable lesson of progressivism, namely the indispensability of patience and gradualism. The next generation cannot be freed en masse from progressive mental control, and yet this freeing of minds is the only way to restore rationality and liberty in the long run.
The necessary conclusion, then: we must begin raising private militias for future battles — people who will not have submission to the progressives as their implicit goal, because, not having learned their rules of engagement in collectivist training camps, they will have become exactly the men most naturally resistant to progressivism: independent, confident, rational, and self-reliant.

The solution?

Military cosplay!

Instead of feminizing ourselves with faggoty education and becoming some filthy liberal nerd who like… knows stuff and crap, we’ll hike deep into the woods with a bunch of sweaty men dressed in ill-fitting camo so we can all “bond” about how masculine and tough and so very not queer we are as we stroke our substitute penises a lot and find excuses to share tents.

In short, remove individual children from public schools, and raise them as individuals.

We are all Huck Finn’s dad now.

You do not have the option of waiting for someone else to act. The trend throughout the world is toward increasing restriction of parental authority. Many Western countries have already outlawed homeschooling.

I could never have guessed that you were aligned with the child abuse lobby… I mean the fight for “parent’s rights”. You were so fucking subtle about it.

What is required, therefore, is educational guerrilla warfare:

Dear bob, stop him on the war analogies before he hurts himself.

Fuck, if I knew this long without a new conflict would give conservatives withdrawals this bad, I’d have disbanded the military and made wearing camo illegal just to watch the motherfuckers really twitch.

I have discussed the practical possibilities elsewhere, but allow me to explain educational guerrilla warfare by way of a personal example. I recently took a stroll with a friend here in Korea — a graduate student, and the young wife of a Christian minister. When she mentioned her plans to have children in the near future, I asked her about the possibility of homeschooling, which is uncommon here. Her initial answer was the typical, “It would be so difficult.” She has a conscience, however, so she immediately chuckled embarrassedly at her own words. Over the course of the ensuing conversation, and a subsequent one, I asked her the basic questions I believe all prospective parents must confront:

Yes… That’s right.

“Educational guerrilla warfare”… the daring commando style man action that could only be performed by the bravest of heroes, dodging the watchful eyes of the ur-conspiracy as stormtroopers seek to eliminate them is…

Memorized evangelical style sales pitches…

Color me underwhelmed at the bravado and risks these brave Freedom Fighters are taking under the Grand Liberal/Reality Empire.

If the friendly but pointed conversation I have just described under the name “guerrilla warfare” does not look like your idea of war, be assured — and warned — that it will look like war to the progressives.

Okay, okay, not even you, the fuckers so deliberately ignorant that you’d treat me like an expert of anything more than what my own shit looks like (and even then, I dunno, I think I want a second opinion) are willing to buy that talking to people is daring MAN MANLY MANLINESS COMMANDO MILITARY HOORAH MAN ARMY NAVY MAN GUNS MAN MAN MAN, but don’t worry, you’re obviously gullible toads, so I’ll just say that liberals will think its war and send you on your merry way.

I mean, fuck, it’s not like you gullible cretins are actually going to look for yourself and see if liberals consider you anything other than dumbshit overcompensating eager playthings of toxic masculinity willing to destroy your children’s futures over desperate intentional ignorance or anything. Goddamn rubes… oh shit, is this mic on… uh, the liberals did it…. suckers.

We, their hated enemy, have only our powers of personal persuasion, our own and our friends’ private consciences, and the strength of knowing that truth and nature are on our side.

Which is why you will continue to lose. Because shouting “IT’S THIS WAY BECAUSE I SAY SO” only works so long until the people you abuse and destroy for noting that reality doesn’t work the way you say it does grow so many that no one is willing to continue to fall for your shit out of a sense of conformist obligation.

And more importantly truth and nature are not behind you at all.

And you’d know that if you picked up a goddamn book for once in your life instead of railing at the injustice of the world for not conforming to your prejudices.

There the dykes go, stripping some dude of his freedom of speech again!

Michael Kinsley, Even the Liberal New Republic:
LGBT PC: Being against marriage equality doesn’t make you a monster

Ah, the trusty old Even the Liberal New Republic. If the stars burn out in the skies, they will still be right here, trying to gift-wrap conservative arguments in ostensibly liberal wrapping paper so as to give the mutated lizard people of the time something to point to in their arguments that their hatred of the filthy liberal mutated squirrel people is hardly hateful.

When last we saw them, they were attempting to spray-paint hardcore gun fetishism as harmless fun for the whole family, so what’s today’s 5-star wanted level reduction?

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Wah! Gays are the real bullies and bigots for speaking out and protesting against the people who seek to publicly dehumanize and demonize them. FREE SPEECH!

Oh conservative and disingenuous moderates’ ideas of “free speech”. We’ve encountered it a million times before. The idea that “free speech” at least for “proper people” is the right of freedom from disagreement. That if one is a conservative bigot, that they should have the right to speak about anything to any captive audience of their choosing without subsequent commentary, protest, rival viewpoint, or even silent disagreement. That anything less than adoring praise for their poorly-reasoned ramblings might as well be stormtroopers ripping the microphones from their hands before locking them in a political dungeon for a million years.

And as liberals who support social justice. And especially as liberals who are the minority groups affected by those social justice struggles, there are few conservative bastardizations that are more annoying and vomit-inducing.

And not just because it’s one of those insulting attempts by conservatives to co-opt a long and hard fought for liberal right and make it about some authoritarian value or because it leads to bizarrely insulting boogeymen like “PC police” or “feminazis” in order to make “being called an asshole” into some brave sacrifice for basic human rights.

But more because as minority group members, we often begin any human rights campaign having our mere existence, our right to appear in public, fought against and attacked, often violently in terms of murder, harassment, beatings, discrimination, and/or public hatred and demands to be “presentable”. This simply for being visible, much less for speaking out on the issues that affect us. For this unthinkable crime, the punishments and feelings of justification for said punishment are often overwhelming. The hoses and dogs sicced on those who spoke out on segregation. The way women who spoke out, and frankly, those who speak out today were often subjected to rape threats, ongoing harassment campaigns, literal demonization, and sometimes murder. The way queers who spoke out have been murdered, beaten, disowned, been subjected to discrimination, incarceration, and abusive “therapies” and so on.

By the point that a minority group has progressed enough in begging the dominant group to take them seriously and stop killing us for speaking on behalf of our rights, we’ve often shed inordinate amounts of blood, tears, and sweat, simply for the right to speak unmolested, only to have those who would rather we were silent claim to be the real “silenced party” because their targets of harassment refuse to be quiet and shouted over and have some small power to respond to bigotry and put the focus on that instead of endless cycling over whether or not minorities should be treated like human beings.

Like for instance, we have here in the example today, the issue of gay marriage and more importantly, about the unwillingness of people of conscience to allow hateful anti-gay bigotry (the type which has delayed important civil rights, led to the disowning, discrimination, and death of queer people, and has overall reduced the happiness allowed to queer individuals just trying to live their lives) go without some small commentary and reaction. Instead of bigotry being met with a chorus of cheers, sometimes bigots get protested at future events they attend. Sometimes, they are called out on their bigotry in public venues. Sometimes, when the arc of public opinion bends away from bigotry as a majority opinion, it is even looked down upon as a backwards and antiquated belief that is “distasteful” to the majority of listeners.

And while such experiences may be uncommon to over-privileged dominant group douchecannons used to blowing their various unfounded and unconsidered hatreds everywhere without fear of censure or even polite commentary, it’s hardly equivalent to a genuine loss of free speech, or anything even close to what the targets of their hatred suffer every time they stand up to exercise their free speech.

And it’s even worse when some “Middle Ground!” dickweed tries to step up and play-act like “oh, I used to support minority group when they had zero political power and were batted around like an old tin can, but now that they can speak on their own behalf, they are the real bigots, shutting out the people trying to silence, demonize, discriminate against, and harass them, just because they are complete assholes with nothing productive to add to the conversation” is not the tired belch of the status-quo trying to further delay a long-blocked civil right.

And further more-

Ahem, Cerberus:

• The post, if you would be so kind?

Sorry, I have a tendency to ramble when I’m avoiding having to read disingenuous smug horseshit masquerading as “reasoned centrist liberal intercourse”.

One reason the idea of gay marriage, or “marriage equality,” spread so fast is that it seems obvious once you think about it.

Yes… That’s kinda how all minority rights’ struggles play out. Lots and lots of noise and fury and “impassioned arguments” for why letting the fluberts skinny dip will ruin our nation, turn our children into screaming space goats, and incinerate Canada’s bacon supply, a long and overly protracted struggle, and then suddenly everyone walking up in post-flubert-nudity-in-swimming-hole America wondering what the big fuss was and how anyone could have given a flying fuck.

In fact, it occurs with such universal consistency, that you’d think one of these cycles might actually begin with people going “oh wait, we’ve pulled this game the last hundred times and turned out wrong, maybe we should just consider this ‘strange new thing’ a full human being from the get go”, but le sigh, it never is to be.

And yeah, you’re little “one reason” weasel wording didn’t go by unnoticed. Yeah, it sure is easy to be “amazed” at the “speed” of an idea if you work to erase the long hard work of queer people humanization that was occurring at the same time, the brutally difficult activism that went into trying to get every queer person who acknowledged their own existence to help promote activism in support of every other queer person through coming out, pride, and support of queer rights issues, the bodies left behind during the Plague Years, or the fact that “gay marriage” is also one at its heart, a more conservative rights battle that was always going to play well to scared middle America.

It was a genuinely new idea when it first appeared in this publication in 1989. As was not the case with civil rights for African Americans, feminism, or for that matter gay rights themselves, there was no long history of opposition to be overcome. The challenge was simply getting people to think about it a bit.

…!

The fuck you say, kemosabe? I don’t even know where to begin with this self-serving horseshit.

Okay, first up:

NO!

No, the hell fucking no, were you the leading voice on gay rights, nor were you even close to being the first publication to talk about the possibility of gay marriage in 198fucking9! Even if we limit our discussion to the USA, discussions about gay marriage (link goes to a pdf, most critical section being page 7 of it) in queer literature and legal rights sectors began in earnest from at least Stonewall when the idea of gay people coming out became more and more a thing in American society, including in various publications. And honestly, before then, the issue was still brought up and discussed even though the idea of legal equality was dismissed as a fantasy in much the way as legally-recognized triad marriages are dismissed today.

Moving outside America, in 1989, Denmark made state-level-marriages between same-sex couples legal (in Denmark, civil marriages are called civil unions). That couldn’t have happened without some serious debates back and forth on the practice and long tired activism on the part of queer Danes. And moving even further, it is worth noting that gay marriages fucking existed even long before that, even though they weren’t always civilly recognized. Gay clubs in 18th century England often had Chapel rooms wherein gay couples would marry in the Eyes of the Lord if not the eyes of the Law. Well, that’s not fully accurate. An amazing book I own called Passions Between Women (no really, it may very well be one of the best take-downs of the argument that queer people or queer characters are a “new phenomenon” out there, despite its narrow focus) notes some entries on a marriage register (p. 65) from Taxal, Cheshire documenting the marriage of several women to other women, in a way apparently recognized by the city government of the time. And that’s before we get into ancient, native, or tribal marriage customs and laws and those who later commented on them.

But that just leads us to the second half of that half-digested biscuit wherein gay rights in 1989 hadn’t faced “a long history of opposition”.

Oh wait, he tries to weasel-word by arguing that it’s just the public discussion of gay marriage. See, at the arbitrary “beginning” point of the rise of arguing for gay marriage, ignoring all previous arguments for marriage or gay rights in general, there wasn’t a long history of opposition…

Which, even if it was true and that really was the beginning of the fight for gay marriage (and only gay marriage) and if we could somehow separate this particular fight from all other queer rights’ issues, how would that statement fucking matter? By their “definition” the struggle was supposedly in its infancy, so how could it have a “long history” of anything. Indeed, in the years hence (I know, just roll with it), we’ve seen that long history develop and materialize just it did for every other attempt by a minority to get serious about a specific overdue right denied them.

And no, no, I’m sorry, but fuck this neutered attempt to try and surgically detach the gay marriage struggle from the rest of the battles for queer human rights and their arbitrary “we were supportive first” bullshit. Gay marriage wasn’t some rights movement born in a lab, it was a natural evolution of a lot of other queer rights struggles and the long attempt of the QUILTBAG rainbow to become full humans in the eyes of the law and society.

It’s a tiny piece of a struggle that’s included the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, the horrifying “Plague Years”, organizations like ACT-UP or the Lavender Menace, accidental leaders like Harvey Milk or Del Martin or Phyllis Lyon, and lots of blood, death, courage, and pain and will continue on long after gay marriages are an afterthought in support of intersex, transgender, asexual, and genderqueer struggles.

And honestly, I think that’s what terrifies the bigots the most. That this “gay marriage” thing isn’t some abominable one-off allowance, but part of a larger struggle of humanization of all queer individuals so that every person under the rainbow can stand up fully as a person deserving a complete chance at life.

It’s almost not even worth continuing for the rest of the article. I could easily stop here and I’dve said everything truly needing to be said about this disingenuous pile of crap.

But fuck if I’m going to let such a blatant attempt to rewrite history get off THAT easy.

So in short, dig in y’all, this is going to be a long one. And note that I’m saying that. Those who want to bail now… I won’t blame you. In fact, I’ll give you a nice stopping point.

Not everyone was immediately persuaded.

Qua? What was that? I thought you said that the hop, skip, and a jump down the yellow-brick road of marriage equality was some meaningless formality, simply a matter of “getting people to think about it a bit” to quote you fucking directly. Now you’re saying that some people didn’t actually go, “my word, you fine young well-groomed people, have all the rights in the world”, but actually reacted like spoiled children not wanting to share their toys?!?

Why, my monocle has clear popped off in the strain of that sudden and unexpected shock!

In March, Ben Carson appeared on Fox News’ “Hannity” show to talk about gay marriage.

A mere chat if you will, on the vagaries of the weather and the incurable apathy of the mongoloid and other meaningless party patter as such! Hardly worth noting to fine upstanding gentlemen such as we, what ho!

Carson is the latest Great Black Hope for the Republican Party, which is quickly running out of African American conservatives to make famous.

Ah ha ha, Muffy, how droll!

But no, seriously, they really are running out of tokens to throw out beneath the stage lights and do a little minstrel dance to make the prolonged tantrum the Republican Party has thrown in response to the existence of a black president look anything other than the KKK revival party it has been.

If they really think a “new black model” will somehow disguise the fact that their party has proudly been the modern incarnation of “Segregation Now, Segregation Forever”, then they are frankly a dumber form of life than pure-bred canines.

But Carson’s appearance was not a success.

Oh do go on, in a way that will surely not minimize the hatefulness of his words and comparisons nor seek an attempt at apology for the not-pologies he issued after he got caught feeding red-meat to the base.

He should have left bestiality out of it. And any reference to NAMBLA—the “North American Man / Boy Love Association”—is pretty good evidence that we have left the realm of rational discussion and entered radio talk-show territory. This alleged organization exists—if indeed it exists at all—for the sole purpose of being attacked by Republicans and conservatives on talk radio and television.

Well, we all get our kicks in different ways, and if yours is watching someone being verbally flogged by Sean Hannity, I’m cool with that.

Oh, dear, my monocle has lodged itself in the unprotected vitreous humor of one of my serving wenches once again. I shall be forced to purchase a new one after I order her disposable corpse ground into meat for the serving staff’s many uncultured children.

I simply was not made for such constant and unyielding shocks. Who could ever have predicted that disingenuous hacks in this day and age would defend even tired bigoted statements equating gay people with bestiality and child molestation in complete ignorance to the concept of CONSENT as if it was some meaningless afterthought. Okay, sure, he sought to continue the discrimination and misinformation against living and breathing people who suffer real pain due to these hateful beliefs, but it’s not like he did it with malice in his heart.

Oh wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. First we need to do the thing where we note that X bigot’s real mistake was departing the lands of conservative group-think to try and defend his beliefs in the real world with that all vaunted FREE SPEECH of his.

Unwisely, though, Carson went on Andrea Mitchell’s msnbc show three days later. There, he tried to clarify his position. He said: “If you ask me for an apple, and I give you an orange, you would say, ‘That’s not an orange.’ And then I say, ‘That’s a banana.’ And that’s not an apple, either. Or there’s a peach, that’s not an apple, either. But it doesn’t mean that I’m equating the banana and the orange and the peach.”

Even in context that doesn’t fucking make any goddamn sense.

And bullshit on the “accidental” nature of the bigotry. In a world where bananas are brutalized because they are seen as equatable to oranges and peaches in a world of right-proper God-fearing apples and that if they no longer want to be crushed and destroyed, they need to become apples or at least hide their banana-ness, then that might almost be innocent, if we then also forgot that the group analogy isn’t fucking stupid on its own as we see here.

And of course, being the Even the Liberal New Republic, of course the sympathy is more on poor Ben Carson looking like a complete fool having absolutely zero argument for why just-so bigoted arguments against gay marriage are in any way different than just-so bigoted arguments against marriages between races or marriages based in love.

And not to spoil things for my monocle-bearing alter-ego, but it’s going to turn out that this is going to be central to future arguments that Ben Carson’s “free speech” is being blocked. Because having no fucking argument to defend in the harsh light of day and not being willing to stand behind one’s hateful beliefs and accept that those you harm and those who care about who you harm will think less of you for it is the exact same as not being allowed to speak on one’s behalf and shit. Spare me.

Carson may qualify as a homophobe by today’s standards.

Who’s a little dismissive euphemism? You are!

Oh deary me, I want to unpack this load of dinosaur dung and leave it spread out all over Michael Kinsley’s dining room table for his whole family to see.

Yes, Carson’s attempt to ignore consent to equate child molester boogeymen and animal rapists with people who are born romantically and/or sexually attracted to same-sex people may be considered homophobic… no, far too strident. May qualify as a homophobe, you know, as if it was qualifying for lower rates on car insurance or for consideration as a member of the human race in a way queer people are currently denied and oh my, too strident again, let’s back it up. This “thing” not worth really noting as bigotry because again, so strident, is of course only by the fashions of the day, much like that strange mohawk thing the kids were wearing for awhile. Something of the moment that will quietly fade away and arising so suddenly and arbitrarily that surely none could ever fault the poor bewildered “old” caught flat-footed by the sudden change. I mean, it was “homophobia is a-okay” one moment and then “you’re a bigoted asshole” the next. Who can possibly keep track of the fickle winds of fashion when one has reached the ripe old age of 61?

We’ll just leave it to those gosh darned kids and pat them on their little heads about how much they seem to care about such silly things like the basic humanity of a marginalized group of people who have gone far too long without that which the dominant group has long since taken for granted.

And you fuckers wonder why we so often have to shout at you for our basic humanity.

But then they don’t make homophobes like they used to.

HURR HURR, go fuck yourself.

Yeah, the struggle for basic humanity is a long and painful slog wherein each part of our humanity and what we are allowed to do in public at the largesse of our abusive “masters” is put together piece-by-piece like the most frustrating puzzle ever. And a lot of those earlier stages involve bigotry that becomes simply inconceivable in later days. Where it becomes strange that being gay once carried with it death sentences and mandatory jail time when other cultures bring it back into the news. Where the old arguments against homosexual teachers (bigotry against non-gender-conforming teachers still continues to this day) seem quaint and a million miles away and where the cheers over the dead ravaged by the AIDS crisis seem like the monstrous actions of something that couldn’t possibly be alive today.

But in a world where those people still exist and where these modern euphemisms still echo the arguments those “older” bigots made in demanding horrific consequences to queers for the “crime” of being out as themselves in public and refusing to remain silent about their life experiences and where the modern bigots are no more “kindly” for having a culture that’s been hard-moved to one that is more supportive of queer basic humanity, it’s a sickness to use those vile human beings of the past to try and legitimize the monsters of the present.

It is not a neutral statement of chance to argue that gay people are equatable to rapists of children and animals and that they carry no meaningful humanity that merits consideration next to the meaningless “suffering” of mere words that have suffered far more dramatic “changes” than this. And it is thanks to the hard work of a thousand queer activists suffering, dying, bleeding, and smashing their faces against the rock wall of ignorance that that is finally starting to be recognized by the majority of society.

That is not the “vicissitudes of the day” nor some modern notion laughable in the context of past sins. That is progress paved on the backs of those queers who had to suffer and die to make the world as it is, by speaking out on the hurt and death those statements create in the form of legitimized and rationalized bigotry.

And frankly, if anything, this dismissal just makes me more determined to smash my face into the rock wall over even smaller things lest my silence on a “minor” action of bigotry in service to calling out a larger one be taken as the former being somehow “not bigoted”, because the latter is so much cartoonishly worse.

Carson denies hating gay people, while your classic homophobe revels in it.

Uh huh, yeah, that’s what happens when a hated minority gains some measure of ability to speak on a meaningful stage and when more neutrals become more willing to stand with them because the arc of history has trundled forth into justice being the “normal” (due to tireless individual activism).

Cause, see, the coward’s pose of “no no, I don’t really hate X, I’m just saying that they are inhuman scum who deserve to die” is what bigots retreat to when they ARE LOSING. When public opinion turns against them and what they fought so bleeding hard to deny becomes almost a certainty, arguments based in “X are monsters who aren’t fully human and thus deserve nothing but malign contempt” are quickly abandoned because bigotry is based in fear and conformity, in sticking to what is now in abstract fear of having to accept something seemingly new. When hard brutal work of showing your humanity pays off in a public realizing that your minority group doesn’t really have horns and a proclivity for little girls, then your enemies retreat to arguing that they don’t hate you, they just don’t think you should have X right. And once you get X right, they start trying to argue that they were always behind you having X right, but now you’ve gone too far in demanding Y. And with Y, Z, and everything passed, they start pretending that no one hated you at all, ever, and you’ve always been a proud member of dominant group and surely will support dominant group’s hatred of some other minority group.

That’s how it works.

So trying to argue that, whoops, no, he couldn’t hate queer people, because he’s unwilling to stand behind the meaning of his words and acknowledge the antipathy behind them, is either the most horse-ignorant pile of shit ever written about minority rights ever written or the most transparent attempt at shrouding one’s own reflexive antipathy ever written.

So, what’ll it be Mike? Dumbest motherfucker alive or most cowardly bigot alive? You can be both, but you can never be neither.

He has apologized publicly “if I offended anyone.”

I mean, fuck you angry about faggots? He delivered the classic “not-pology”, you know the one that tries to huffily insinuates the blame is one the offended party for “reading things into it that weren’t there”, but not in a direct way because the bigot doesn’t have the vulva to stand behind their bullshit and accept the consequences thereof. (Which, let’s bring that up here for a second. How many times has a bigot who can’t even stand up against mild criticism when their bullshit is called on tried to act like a big tough mother fucker, when the group they are hating on has had to use their face as a tunneling instrument just to get to a world where they can call out an asshole without suffering real violent consequences is treated as whiners for taking that consistently brave stand. But hey, I guess if we didn’t handicap the “manly” spectrum for over-privileged cowards then how could they function in the harsh glow of reality, right?) What else do you want?

He supports civil unions that would include all or almost all of the legal rights of marriage.

Well, la de da, let’s just back up the Pride Parade and make him our Queen.

Collected bigots and bigot apologists, you fucking well had your chance to support civil unions and to grant them equal footing with civil marriages. You had that chance when gay activists scarcely dreamed to ask for more and when they cautiously begged for just a taste of full equality while you laughed at them and pissed in their faces.

Now? When full marriage equality is supported by the majority of Americans, is fully legally recognized in 13 states with no reports of the sky falling and full USA marriage equality being just a matter of time?

Fuck you and your loser’s deal last-minute attempted hobbling bullshit.

YOU. LOST.

That battle you were so proud of? The one in which you mocked our even daring to dream that such rights could be granted to those seeking legal protections for our same-sex romantic pairings? The one in which you denied us equality simply because you could, simply because it was in your power and it made you feel good to be “special” simply because of an accident of birth? And where you built fortunes on the abuse and suffering of those couples who simply wanted to protect the families they made? Where you supported those who literally tried to shatter families because of petty hatred and fear of difference?

YOU. LOST. IT.

And now, marriage equality for homo-romantic pairs are proceeding on and will occur, though you continue to THIS VERY DAY to delay it again out of nothing more noble than an addiction to hate and petty bigotry. And you still DARE, you fucking dare to wheddle and bargain on long-lost battles as if you even remotely had a position of strength to bargain from?

Fuck you. Fuck your disingenuous oh so noble pose. Fuck the horse you rode in on. Fuck the dickweasels you are paid to cover for. Fuck you.

And if you find that “incivil”, get used to it. It’s only going to get worse as more battles continue on their predictable course thanks to the blood and sweat of those whose lives you fight to make more miserable.

In other words, he has views on gay rights somewhat more progressive than those of the average Democratic senator ten years ago.

Times change and so should you.
But I guess, you’d rather crucify than learn.

But as a devout Seventh Day Adventist, he just won’t give up the word “marriage.”

You know what?

I’m fucking sick and tired of entertaining this coward’s retreat. The bigots fucking know they don’t fucking care about the so-called “sanctity” of a fucking word. It’s a fucking word. No one fucking cares about how it’s “injured” or “stolen away”, because it’s a fucking word. It has no fucking feelings, no history, no opinions, no loyalties. It is a whore for wordsmiths to use and abuse, for poets to make love to and leave spent drippings upon the page over. It is nothing and asking real born living people to suffer quietly and contentedly so that the word won’t be woken up from its little nappy time and undergo the same “change” that it undergoes every time some bigoted group tries and claim unwarranted ownership of it because it won’t trick the way they want it to, is a sickness unworthy of the attention it has received.

And as an added note, marriage was never yours. You tried to cage it up in your dungeon, get it addicted to your smack and attempted to lay claim to its exclusive use for your little religious bigot club when you needed a convenient excuse once “but they’re faggots” stopped working. But it was never yours.

So if its reunification with people who will actually love and support it causes you to undergo the pain and sorrow that all abusive lovers feel when their prey eludes and escapes them?

GOOD.

And he has some kind of weird thing going on about fruit.

Yes, it’s called half-assed attempts to normalize bigotry.

Given this article, you’d think you’d be well familiar with that.

But then, no one ever said you were a smart man.

But none of this matters. All you need to know is that Carson opposes same-sex marriage. Case closed.

You know, being emphatic about your attempts to dismiss the context of people’s actions doesn’t at all do anything to erase them from reality. The context still exists and your attempt to dismiss that as if poor widdle Ben Carson was just some innocent little grandpa who would never speak a word of hatred ever but just so happens to oppose a basic human right for a marginalized class… er, I mean, something that makes him seem the innocent victim of vile queer harpies, is just… poof. Flatulence in the wind, carrying no more weight or impact for having been squeezed out harder and with a grimace on your face.

Carson was supposed to be the graduation speaker at Johns Hopkins Medical School. There was a fuss, and Carson decided to withdraw as speaker.

Translation?

Under the literally slightest amount of push-back, he punked the fuck out. No, really. Queer students hadn’t even gotten to the point of protesting the inclusion of a speaker on a day supposed to be about them that dismisses and hates those like them before Carson went out like a coward. They were just on the “passing around a petition to have him removed” phase which in terms of consequences for idiocy ranks up there with “person you’re speaking to rolls their eyes”.

Basically, he couldn’t even take mild publicity of his abhorrent beliefs and so went into full victim crouch instead and pathetic apologists like the Even the Liberal New Republic couldn’t wait to stroke his crotch and tell him how brave Sir Ben was to run away from the mean real world.

Speaking as someone who has lost the love of my parents, have been discriminated out of at least one job, and have suffered all manner of petty and transparent hatreds simply for not running and hiding in a closet, I find myself without an abundance of fucks to give for this self-made martyr’s story.

The obviously relieved dean nevertheless criticized Carson for being “hurtful.” His analysis of the situation was that “the fundamental principle of freedom of expression has been placed in conflict with our core values of diversity, inclusion and respect.” My analysis is that, at a crucial moment, the dean failed to defend a real core value of the university: tolerance.

Cause, tolerance should only ever be shown for bigots, tolerating their petty hatreds as if they no more affected the world than a Maroon 5 lyric. No tolerance should ever be had for marginalized groups and their petty desire to not have to sit and silently be the captive audience to a man who considers them inhuman rapists who should never be granted basic human rights.

No, that’s not an exaggeration, that’s his direct line of thinking. The Dean’s letter on the issue wasn’t particularly hard to find and instead of being a story of a brave man standing strong in the face of unprecedented hatred for their hatred, it was the story of a man who was being praised by the Dean, but the Dean wanted to listen to all perspectives on the issue now that their commencement speaker revealed themselves to be a petty ignorant bigot on the national stage and pissed off all the students.

And even if there had been real consequences in terms of people protesting his inclusion or John Hopkins being the ones to rescind his invitation, well, yeah, that’s part of free speech.

Free speech doesn’t actually mean freedom from consequences.

It doesn’t mean that baby is swaddled in his blankie and protected from the big bad world out there and all the people who also have the Freedom of Speech and the Freedom of Assembly and who just politely suffered through you using your Freedom of Speech to demean and diminish their basic humanity and overall spout tired hackneyed hatreds you don’t even have the ovaries to stand behind.

It means when you say something, you gotta accept that others will not agree. Even if it is something “obvious” like “As a trans* person, I’m a human being who deserves rights” or “The sky is blue”, you have to accept that there may be a horde of ignorant or hateful people who will scream and yell at you for it. It’s part of sharing the world with other people. And us marginalized groups have accepted that a lot of innocuous statements out of our mouths will be treated to some colossal consequences that you and your ilk will never EVER suffer.

So when you use that right of free speech to bully or engender hatred against a group of living breathing people, then that group of people and the people who love, support, or simply recognize the humanity of will call you on your shit. They will use their Freedom of Speech to point out that you are wrong or that you are a bigot or that you are a coward without the conviction to stand behind your hateful words when others show the damage and righteous anger they cause. And being the side on the right, they will do so without the bullying or violence or harassment that your side loves to engage in. They instead will use their Freedom to Assemble to protest your words and remind audiences of your history of hate. They will use their Freedom of Speech to petition their leaders and ask to be heard as well in the consideration of your inclusion to positions of prominence.

And you want the right of your bigots to speak unopposed, on positions they cannot defend in light of day. So I’m sorry if it sounds harsh, but go fuck yourself on a pile of needles.

The university’s response was wrong for a variety of reasons. First, Carson isn’t just another gasbag. He is director of pediatric neurosurgery at Hopkins. Pediatric neurosurgery! He fixes children’s brains. How terrible can a person be who does that for a living?

Apparently this terrible.

But then, he’s hardly the first person who is otherwise all right, but turns out to be a vile hateful bigot with regards to some marginalized group of people.

Maybe if less churches preached hate, less bigots spoke unopposed about the inhumanity of said marginalized groups, and we all learned to accept that the world includes those marginalized groups and we’ll have to deal with that as adults…

Nah, sounds far too difficult. Much easier to just point and say “hey, he’s halfway decent in other ways, so let’s give him a free pass on the hatred, dehumanization, and efforts to deny real human rights on a group of people we hate anyways.”

Yes, I know the flaw in this thinking: There is no necessary connection.

Oh really?!? You caught the tiny little bug in that logic fail all by yourself?

Well, let me just back up the cookie truck so I can give you all the fucking Kudos on that monumental task!

As a character says in Mel Brooks’s movie The Producers: “der Führer vas a terrific dancer.” But Carson didn’t murder millions of people.

Hey, Philosophy majors, what’s the name of the fallacy where you try and dismiss a valid point by pointing to a ludicrous exaggerated example and then going “but hey, he wasn’t the guy in my analogy so therefore act as if my earlier fallacy is A-OK”?

All he did was say on television that he opposes same-sex marriage—an idea that even its biggest current supporters had never even heard of a couple of decades ago. Does that automatically make you a homophobe and cast you into the outer darkness? It shouldn’t. But in some American subcultures—Hollywood, academia, Democratic politics—it apparently does. You may favor raising taxes on the rich, increasing support for the poor, nurturing the planet, and repealing Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, but if you don’t support gay marriage, you’re out of the club.

Oh noes! He’s “thrown out into the outer darkness”! Cast outside the world, into the dark spaces inbetween, the shaded lands between existing and not existing where the forgotten beasts of forgotten worlds yet roam seeking once again the light of day.

Weep for this exile, ill-earned, but for a slip of the tongue and a mild opinion with no bearing on the physical rights of born individuals. For his suffering is unearned and too cruel and surely unprecedented in this modern day and age. If he was of a subculture where bigotries cast negative light on you (instead of being a proud toolbag of the GOP), he could be poorly thought of and considered a not-true ally simply because he denies the basic humanity of born people for ill-thought out reasons.

Is there any greater injustice in this world? How could one man be brought so low by something so small…

It is to laugh.

Actual born queer people simply saying to their parents “Mom? Dad? I’m gay” suffer more consequences than this clown. They often lose the love of their parents, often expect to lose the love, support, and protection of their parents and other family members, to say goodbye and literally start again from scratch because the narrative of full and unconditional support is so FUCKING rare. And this has real consequences, not “cast out of the light” consequences but measurable increases in poverty, depression, teen suicide rates, abuse, drug addiction, homelessness, etc… For something that doesn’t hurt, doesn’t wound, doesn’t cause a parent to abandon their child. Something deserving nothing of consequence.

So someone publicly standing for unpopular bigotry being called out on the bullshit they can’t even bother to proudly stand behind? I can’t be bothered to weep for that. I can’t pretend that that is some unprecedented atrocity, a betrayal of free speech intended to silence and demonize people simply for speaking their minds.

Because I’m not an ignorant shitheel who only thinks the live of over-privileged assholes are the only ones that matter and that protecting someone from the consequences of their hurtful hateful ignorance is a worthy endeavor.

If he is called a cowardly dickwaffle, he brought that upon himself. That 14-year-old boy who is going to hang himself in the garage because his father religiously watches the Fox News that constantly brings on guests who spew hate and thus reacted with hate and fear when he caught his boy masturbating to pictures of guys, didn’t bring that upon himself. He had it thrust upon him by a bigoted society that is long overdue for change.

Hopkins, as a private institution, may not have been constitutionally required to let Carson speak.

But it was wrong for the university, once the invitation had been extended, to make Carson feel unwanted to the point of withdrawing. (In fact, it was wrong of Carson to let Hopkins off the hook in this way.)

Oh boo fucking hoo.

He punked the fuck out. You can chide him for not giving you a martyr story and whine about how no one is allowed to change their minds in lieu of new information and facts, but that’s not how the world works and not what he did.

He decided to make a public ass of himself on a national stage to show his conservative bonafides and earned himself the righteous ire of those his hate-speech targeted. And then he buckled under even the slightest pushback.

You can try and argue that he was “made to feel unwanted”, but frankly, considering that I’ve seen first-hand what “being made to feel unwelcome” in a gig really feels like? And have further seen people like Anita Sarkeesian, Adria Richards, Rebecca Watson, or Sandra Fluke continue to speak up as the swift and brutal hammer of harassment, rape threats, death threats, continued abuse, and multi-year-long hate campaigns fixated on destroying them came down?

I just can’t muster up a single damn to throw Ben Carson’s way. He wasn’t “made to feel unwelcome”, he tried to make gay people feel unwelcome in life, tried to contribute to the culture that urges them to hide or kill themselves rather than be themselves and got called an asshole for it. If I and other minority group members suffered such “pain” we’d be a fuck-ton more happy than we actually are.

Behind the First Amendment is the notion that good ideas have a natural buoyancy that bad ideas do not.

Uh… no. No, that really isn’t it.

Good ideas don’t have a “natural buoyancy” that we must handicap and hobble so that bad ideas can “have a fair shake”. Good ideas are simply good ideas, things that are true and so have a greater chance to resonate once mixed with the actual reality of a situation.

They can be drowned out just as easily as bad ideas in the noise and clutter and when we privilege bad ideas by chiding good ideas and demanding that they shut the fuck up for “balance”, they have just as good a chance to proliferate and dominate the culture that we inherit as we are born and grow up in this world.

Bigotry is carefully taught. By thousands of bad ideas riding on the benefit of them bullying and shouting over those good ideas, by harassing and abusing good ideas and making sure those who trade in them suffer.

The only way good ideas rise up is by constant activism. And more importantly, more and more of those who acknowledge reality being willing to stand up and tell those bad ideas that they are bad. That those bad ideas should come up with something new or shut the fuck up about the tired arguments we’ve heard 9000 times before. That those who trade in those bad ideas are not “misunderstood and oppressed good people” but idiots, charlatans, and bigots whose ideas are not worthy of equal treatment with good ideas. By noting that there is no substance to bad ideas, no accuracy, no worth, beyond the suffering of those who carry good ideas and continuing to babysit those bad ideas does no one any favors.

But hey, I guess, if we imagine a world where activists and “PC warriors” don’t exist, where good ideas simply “rise” as a formality due to their rightness without human intervention, it makes it easy to support the taking of those good ideas and drowning them in the bathtub of FREEZE PEACH!

In fact, the very short (as these things go) debate about marriage equality demonstrates this. Denying Carson the right to speak was not just unprincipled. It was unnecessary. The proponents of marriage equality have not just won. They have routed the opposition. It’s a moment to be gracious, not vindictive.

Oh, the whine one can make from this heap of fail. A vintage to be unrivaled, I am sure.

WAH! We already lost, you don’t have to rub it in by like continuing to advance your human rights and speak on behalf of your humanity! A *sniff* gracious opponent would just stop in the middle of the game and walk off the field so that we could catch back up and continue to oppress you.

Especially if they haven’t actually caught up to our humanity yet, but we’re just really worried that the unfair 100 point advantage we were handed at the beginning of the game is at threat due to our complete incompetence.

Gracious… yeah, when queer people begged for their humanity from a position of nothing. When gay people were dying in inordinate number in the AIDS crisis, when they were arrested throughout the early part of the century, when Harvey Milk was shot and killed, the homophobes cackled in glee and pushed in the boot. Still to this day they cling and scrape to hold on to unfair advantages and petty hatreds long after it has made sense to and blocked all attempts to reform that they could, often yanking those human rights out of gay people’s hands through money, lies, and fraud.

And now that the game is rumbled and the long delayed human rights are barely beginning to be won, they want to lecture us on gracious.

…

And the sad thing is that minority groups are always gracious when they earn rights. They never press on and reduce those who oppressed them to their level. When struggling, they nearly always speak out on their members who turn to reflexive hatred of the dominant group. And they often err on the side of being overforgiving to those who meant them harm, allowing them to live their lives unmolested for having done so much to fuck over them.

And still they whine and scream and moan about “graciousness” because we are unwilling to roll over and die for them like proper serfs.

There are those who would have you think that gays and liberals are conducting some sort of jihad against organized Christianity and that gay marriage is one of the battlefields. That is a tremendous exaggeration. But it’s not a complete fantasy.

I want this statement tattooed on Michael Kinsley’s face so in 20 years when opposition to gay marriage is looked back on like opposition to segregation and he tries to reinvent himself as “the man who first supported gay marriage back in 1989″ or some such bullshit, this petty ante bigotry can continue to haunt him and bite him in his tight fucking ass.

And for every mouth that opens, a dozen stay clamped shut.

The irony is that this still yet remains the real lived experiences of queer individuals. Because of bigotry and hate, for every person who comes out, a dozen remain in the closet. For every person who defends a gay person against bigotry, a dozen are intimidated into staying quiet and parroting the hate line so as not to put in the line of fire themselves. For every person who is out at work about their life partner, another dozen pretend to love opposite-sexed genitals because it’s just not worth being genuine.

But of course, Pumpnuts McGee here doesn’t mean that.

In the state of Washington, a florist refused to do the wedding of a long-time customer “because of my relationship with Jesus Christ.” Note that “long-time customer.” This woman had been happily selling flowers to the groom. She just didn’t want to be associated with the wedding. Now she is being sued by the state attorney general. DC Comics dropped writer Orson Scott Card’s planned Superman book when thousands signed a petition demanding it because of his many homophobic remarks.

He means the tired handful of “martyr” examples that every Christianist bigot trots out whenever they want to seem the victims of the Big Nasty Gays. A tiny handful of examples that a) have nothing to do with real discrimination but rather the violation of either non-discrimination laws or bans of using public spaces or services to practice narrow bigotries and b) are just… cute, in light of what real oppression looks like. Real discrimination.

He could not even guess what it really feels like to have your quality and your willingness to work be as nothing, no matter your input, because of some bigot’s idea of who you are because of something you were simply born with or simply are.

Not something you did, not something you said, simply WHO you are.

It is something on so many levels removed from this tired smattering of “sorrows” and something that is so common that there is no oft-repeated list of “martyrs” to trade around for years on end. It happens so frequently that it simply is. The expectation one carries around and haunts every single member of the community. You have a story of discrimination? So what? Every other member of your community does too. And not a damn one of them did something so stupid as tell their customers that they were discriminating against them in violation of well-publicized state laws.

Thought experiment: If you were up for tenure at a top university, or up for a starring role in a big movie, or running for office in large swaths of the country, would it hurt your chances more to announce that you are gay or to announce that you’ve become head of an anti-gay organization? The answer seems obvious. So the good guys have won. Why do they now want to become the bad guys?

Yeah, it is. Being gay, hands down. Discrimination may be illegal, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen, continuously, especially in sectors where the older, whiter, more bigoted members have more sway. If you are up for tenure and you are gay, you are very likely to have a harder road, more questions raised about your competences, more suspicions cast on your student reviews, more “issues” regarding your qualifications connected to nothing actually solid.

And also, let’s just take a moment to appreciate the starkness of the contrast painted here. Being gay. Being born a thing. Something not chosen, but given at birth. Whose membership was not a choice, not a decision, but something inherent and immutable. Whose “political nature” was simply who they were, are, and always will be, regardless of what the rest of the world thinks. Something that doesn’t affect anyone in any real or meaningful way, but which plenty of people have opinions of and want to limit the human rights of nonetheless.

Compared to being the leader of a bigoted organization. Something one chose. Continues to choose at every single point to remain a member and leader of. Something that one must ignore the evidence, reality, and humanity of another group of people to support. Something that has nothing to do with one’s own self, but everything to do with making other people suffer for a petty rush of power. With making the lives of other people who simply… are, visibly, painfully worse out of nothing but cold malice and the opportunity afforded to you by your relative power. That one could at any minute abandon with no impact on their self in any meaningful way other than a “oops, yeah, that was assholic of me”.

These are equated directly. And our sympathy is begged to be given to the person who chose to hate and destroy the other and devote their life to that hatred.

This is exactly how terrible a person Michael Kinsley is.

And if this was a just world, this sort of thing will be rubbed in his face once our society catches up with reality and queer individuals are treated like the full human beings they have always been.

The decision of gay leaders to concentrate on the right to marry was brilliant. This wasn’t an inevitable choice. They might have chosen some other strategy, such as getting sexual preference under the protection of the civil rights laws, along with race, gender, and so on. Choosing marriage totally undercut the argument of opponents that gay men and women were demanding “special” rights.

Yeah, that “decision” sure did stop the bitching about “special” rights that bigots did. Mmmhmm.

All they wanted, supporters could say truthfully, was a right (to marry someone you love) that every other American already enjoys.

You’re bitter about this. You are actually legitimately bitter over this.

You are mad that gay people’s arguments for a basic human right are that it’s a basic human right and you’ve got nothing meaningful to argue on behalf of your learned hatreds.

And you want us to continue you are anything other than the most base and wretched of bigots?!?

But the focus of gay rights on marriage is a historical accident, and to make support for marriage equality the test of right thinking on gay issues is absurd. In fact, the very idea of a “test of right thinking on gay issues” or any other kind of issues, is absurd. Gays, who know a thing or two about repression, ought to be the last people to want to destroy someone’s career because they disagree. In their moment of triumph, why can’t they laugh off nutty comments like Carson’s, rather than sending in the drones to take him out?

…!

I… can’t even… begin…

Fuck it. Those three of you who could manage to read this far. I give this mango to you. I trust you will savage it so as to properly leave this pile of tiger droppings and splooge as napalmed as it deserves to be.

The first known mention of gay marriage is an article (“Here Comes the Groom” by Andrew Sullivan) commissioned by me and published in this magazine in 1989.

BULLSHIT!

There are references to gay marriages that stretch back to before recorded history. Your johnny-come-lately “Why can’t gays be given rights but no one else” libertarian sludge-merchant has never been first to anything in his goddamn life and your attempts to suggest otherwise to “alleviate” your transparent support for “Homophobia Forever” in the preceding paragraphs is the true apex of cowardice in bigotry.

And I would bet that there is no one born before 1989, gay or straight, who didn’t, when he or she first heard the idea, go, whaaa?

I would accept that bet. I would make you guarantee a large amount of money with a binding contract first. And then I would win. Handily. Needing to go no further to demonstrate it than my own damn self.

But hey, given the epic scope of this takedown, it was worth seeing a nice shoutout to IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION.

Many on reflection got used to the idea, and a majority of Americans now support it. The day will come, probably next Tuesday at the rate things are going, when previous opposition to the idea of same-sex marriage will seem bizarre and require explaining, like membership in the Ku Klux Klan in the youths of some old Southerners—are there any left?—on Capitol Hill.

Yes, it will. And in those final days, you chose to side with the waning KKKers whining about how people are looking at them like they are villains simply because they string up black people and try and terrorize those who would support them out of their homes.

I can only hope that that choice will cause you on some future night to wake up in a cold sweat in the grim acknowledgment of your foul deeds.

But we’re not quite there yet. At the moment, simply opposing gay marriage doesn’t make you a homophobe, any more than opposing affirmative action makes you a racist

Um… no, it does. Sorry. Being against basic human rights of another group of people makes you a bigot against said people.

Always.

Forever.

or opposition to settlements on the West Bank makes you an anti-Semite.

But nice attempt at a save by listing something that has nothing to do with basic human rights but rather the violation of another group’s basic human rights.

The dean calls Carson’s remarks “hurtful.” They weren’t hurtful to him, unless he’s hopelessly oversensitive.

He’s hopelessly oversensitive. But more importantly YOU are hopelessly oversensitive and far more the fulfillment of the stereotype of the “oversensitive liberal looking for a reason to be offended” than any liberal to ever walk the Earth.

Because as much as you try and make people standing up for their basic humanity appear like the “pathetic whining” of disingenuous crybabies looking for a reason to bitch, it doesn’t change the fact that marginalized groups eat a lot of shit with little reaction or fuss. We accept the hate and fear and dehumanization and only speak up when we can’t take any more because well, we gotta survive in this world best we can.

While you cry like a wounded beast at its last when you receive even the slightest amount of pushback for your petty hatred and bigotry.

And yet you want to claim the mantle of the big bad and brave man against an army of whiny little bitches who couldn’t hold your candle. Because IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION is as much about pumping up your pathetic fantasies about yourself as it is about dismissing the actual lived experiences of those whose lives you seek to demolish and ruin.

The dean was just making a move in the great game of umbrage that has clogged American politics, where points are awarded for taking offense at something the other guy said. No one, when confronted with some opponent’s faux pas, or some stray remark that can be misrepresented as a faux pas, ever reacts anymore with: “Who cares?” Instead, it’s: “I am deeply, deeply offended by this person’s remarks. She should drop out of the race immediately, or quit her job, and move into a nunnery to contemplate her sins. And we certainly can’t let her speak at commencement because …”

Because what?

Because bigotry is not neutral. Is not an accident. Is not some innocent thing that others are “cruel” for calling notice to.

It is an attempt to dehumanize, bully, harass, oppress. To make their lives worse, to make them feel like nothing, and contribute to a society that brutally oppresses them, denies them rights, treats them as less than, and often kills them whether by murder, suicide, or poverty.

It has real life consequences. The suicide rates for a number of marginalized groups is obscene. The murder rates, the health and hapiness rates? If we compared the life experiences of a black trans lesbian with a rich white man, it is literally the difference between a third world life experience and a first world one. Even if it occurs in the same country or the same city.

And it is propped up with these petty hatreds, the way bigotries breed and feed and shout down any attempt of the abused party to speak up on behalf of their humanity and refuse to tolerate the passive hatred anymore. Refuse to reward those who seek them wrong anymore. The way that their bigots will disguise themselves as moderates, whining about how unfair it is that the oppressors should suffer the humanity of the abused and marginalized, those who lack real rights and have harder lives for no true good reason. For something that they will pretend they never stood for in a handful of decades.

For something that will be as a given. And where those bigotries will be looked upon as the obvious horrors that no one today could be bigoted in comparison to.

People will have died and bled and been harassed and denied something tiny before it stopped mattering for that nothing, that bigotry that could have been countered and fought against when it could have saved someone some unnecessary pain.

Because free speech is not freedom from speech. Is not the protection of bad ideas from the “tyranny” of good ideas being spoken. Of marginalized voices participating in the conversation. Of bigotry being countered.

Because even if it takes over 10,000 words, sometimes it is worth using one’s own speech to communicate just how hateful, destructive, and vile certain ideas are when they contribute to the continued oppression of people simply for the way they be, and will always be.

Because, as you say, the reaction to free speech is more speech. Criticizing and reminding the bigots what their words do. What price they have in human lives and human suffering.

And for what exact point?

Is it for FREE SPEECH? FREEZE PEACH? Or any half dozen other refuges of the scoundrel? Or is it for a batch of scared bigots who no longer find the strength of crowds giving power to their petty power displays?

I think you know as well as I the answer to that one.

And I hope one day it comes back to bite you on your smug disingenuous ass at least half as hard as life today bites those whose oppression you are not-so-covertly supporting.

And that goes for all the other “I’m not a bigot, but” sonuvabitches out there too.

If we all just believe we’re back in the 13th century hard enough, then we can return. So believe! Cause that’s how any of that works…

K-Lo, National Revue:
Politics Won’t Save Us

Things can often be disheartening. Society seems to be stagnant, waiting. Our bought and sold media has been shotgunning as many made up right-wing scandals as they can in the vain hope that something, anything will stick to Obama and allow them to paint Democrats as “scandalous”. Rich assholes continue to buy up more and more outlets to serve as their personal propaganda sources. And real issues go begging as we once again jump through the hoops set by a tiny minority of aggrieved octagenarians.

And so, sometimes, it can be hard to remember that we are actually winning. That meaningful political victory and long-delayed social justice are but a finger’s breadth away and the wingnuts know it.

And of course, being wingnuts, they are handling this realization with all the class and style we would come to expect from them.

Shorter:

• Holy fuck, we’ve created a monster with the marriage of Christian Dominists and Ayn-Rand-fetishists. Also, I think we might be losing. So can we just hit the reset button on everything and start over so we don’t have to go through the phase where we have to begrudgingly accept the long-delayed advancement of basic civil rights?

My favorite out-of-context mangos?

By keeping in mind that we may be wrong — that we are in fact very likely to be wrong in important ways — we help each other and ourselves to become less wrong over time.

And

The current chaos of our public debates about family life and fertility, about relationships and foundational vocabulary, is an opportunity to rebuild a culture that understands hard work, suffering, and sacrifice, including self-sacrifice, to be at the heart of what makes society work and work well.

If you dare go off the shore, I entreat you to enjoy more…

If you dare, that is.

And to think, this irrevocable road to evil all started when a single boy scout admitting to liking a Disney movie with a female protagonist. If only America had stood firm. Sniff.

The President of the United States of Renew America*:
Mormons morphing Boy Scouts into ‘Girl Scouts’?

Damn, I’m sure going to be disappointed when this turns out to be yet another transmisogynist (because the great flavors of misogyny and transphobia just go so well together like cranapple or being a complete fuck and being a conservative) tantrum rather than a description of some transformation or gender-swap fanfic.

In fact, why wait? Scrolling ahead and:

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• The fact that the Mormon Church would even think about letting the Boy Scouts be anything other than a hate group about how much faggots and trannies suck and deserve to burn in Hell shows how much more “moral” Evangelicals are in comparison.

Damnitt, and we were so close to seeing a new young adult series about Scouts doing gender transformations to defeat an alien invasion.

And loathe as I am to defend the Mormon Church on anything at the moment (fuck Prop 8), I can already tell I’m going to be compelled to do so as our wingnut du jour wastes no time going off the rails on a crazy train.

As the gay agenda rolls forth unchecked in fulfillment of its published goals and tactics

We will not rest until every continental breakfast contains an entree made of Christian babies. It is unfair how lesbians are denied their culinary needs in our glorious march of oppressing straight people through forced same sex weddings.

Actually, this puff of paranoia is about a random 23 year old book called After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of the Gays in the 90s, which in the gay community is mostly known as a work that argued overly much for sacrificing passion for pragmatism. But apparently it’s enjoying a nice revival amongst the tin-foil hat brigade who want to act like it’s some super secret list of marching orders that modern gays are using to enact Alinksy style brainwashing. And if you don’t believe me, you can just look at the current most-helpful Amazon reviews for the book.

— dragging Western Civilization down more predictably than the Muslim Brotherhood is likely ever to do —

Awwwwww. They hate us! They really hate us!

rational Americans need to come to grips with one of the most damnable frauds in the world’s history: the belief that there is such a thing as “being gay.”

Vile damnable gay people, trying to pretend that they “exist” what with their “existing” and all. Well, I’m on to them and their devious incorporeality!

And yeah, if this actually were true and he really were super obsessed with some the nefarious actions of a non-existent being, then… oh wait, Fundie Christian… huh, I guess not much would be different for him at all, then.

I vividly remember a college lecture I attended in the mid-sixties by the one-time head of the American Psychological Association, Hobart Mowrer, who plainly asserted there is a direct correlation between mental illness and sin.

Luckily, Universities have moved on from the days when apparently any homeless man could rant about the evil leprechauns in their teeth to become internationally accredited institutions of learning. And it happened around the time we let women and minorities into them. How interesting…

But seriously, Mowrer went a bit off the rails when he “found God” going from someone who just thought guilt was a great healer to someone obsessed with the idea that guilt and sin are responsible for all maladies of the mind, considered the Old Testament God a role model for happy families, and only championed group therapies (which turned out to be helpful for other reasons) because he thought it would maximize the times someone might break down and cry and reveal all their dirty icky sinfulness. In short, like most early psychologists, he was a creep who used his personal issues as a supposed universal rule for humanity. The field is better for having moved away from those like him.

I was quite astonished at his boldness — as he advocated a minority view then still held among many of his peers: that God is real, that violation of His laws is the main source of guilt, and that failure to abandon inherently sinful behavior leads naturally to serious consequences, including mental illness.

Fifty years later, the Western world has been deceived into accepting the false premise that one of the most ungodly sins in the Bible is no longer wrong, no longer sinful, and unattached to destructive consequences, not just for the individuals involved but for society as a whole.

Ironically, one of the chief sources of such self-delusion is Mowrer’s organization, the American Psychological Association, with its now widely-accepted position that homosexuality is a normal, healthy lifestyle, and that gays have little choice but to yield to their same-sex attraction.

Where have all the sane behavioral scientists gone?

Of course, not all would agree.

Now comes word that the influential Mormon church, with its progressively gay-friendly revisionism, is supporting the move to persuade the Boy Scouts of America to accept into its ranks young men (and hence the next generation of BSA leaders) who self-identify as homosexual,

Well… kinda. The actual resolution is pretty much a “what’s the bare amount of faggotry we can allow to get the media off our back about the fact that the Boy Scouts are just foot-soldiers for a narrow-minded religious cult”. When all is said and done, it pretty much says they’ll only accept a gay boy scout as long as they don’t act gay, certainly don’t do anything gay or in any way shape or form look like anything other than a super straight Christian and even then the prohibition on discrimination is so weak that as long as there is one other stated reason (including “ungodly behavior”, like say being gay) then its a-okay. In short, hardly a ringing endorsement for joining the 21st century and at all correcting the accurate assessment of the Boy Scouts being run as a religious hate group these days.

in open disregard for the BSA’s century-old “Scout Oath,” which is based in biblical morality.

Yeah, but somehow I think if the Boy Scouts had been as overtly religious as they are these days throughout that century history, I doubt we’d be talking about them except as a “hey, why isn’t there a boy version of the girl scouts, where they like hiked in the woods and stuff, that’d be awesome”.

He then follows this up with a bunch of paragraphs trying to argue that dem dere LDS boys be fag-lovers.

It is to laugh, yes.

The reason for the church’s turnabout? Increasing acceptance of the behavioral science community’s general view that homosexuality is “inborn,”

Curse you science! Is there nothing you do not corrupt with your queerification rays?!?

and thus largely biological (even though there’s no evidence of a “gay gene” — a fact conceded in 2009 by the APA).

This is apparently cited by a link to Wing Nut Daily. Nuff said.

At the heart of the church’s evolving acceptance of gays is also the widespread increase of homosexual children and grandchildren among the church’s membership. Whereas the Bible is clear in its condemnation of homosexuality as an insidious evil, the church has liberalized its posture toward the practice over the years “out of compassion” for families with gay adults and children — thinking such permissiveness is not only beneficial to serious transgressors of God’s laws, but to society at large.

Yes… the Mormon Church is just so loving towards gay children…

And yes, as a California native, I’m loving the delicious irony of the Mormon Church’s belated attempt at whitewashing their hideous past to appear more “loving” with regards to an issue that America is quickly turning around on really fooling the bigoted assholes they worked so hard to curry favor with (by making their name synonymous with anti-gay bigotry) in order to try and get them to support the doomed presidential campaign of The Smiler. Delicious.

Justifying this moral shift is the distinctive belief among Mormons that the LDS church is the only true church of God, and as such, is entitled to supersede the Bible with human wisdom in the guise of “modern revelation.”

Put plainly, according to the evolving mores of Mormonism, God has changed His mind on homosexuality.

Which is pretty much the Mormon response every time their bass-awkwards views on a subject like race, gender, etc… becomes nationally known as the belated hateful claptrap that it is. Try and pretend it away by claiming a new convenant that completely replaces the old and everybody pretend that that bad thing never existed. What, did we support segregation well into the 90s? Whoops, new covenant, now we hide behind the magic underwear of our 2 or 3 black mormons whenever anyone brings it up.

Hell, it’s how most religions react to finally holding a belief that society deems far too toxic to support openly. Always having “deeply held beliefs” right up to the point where it is seriously hurting the bottom line and then, whoopsie daisy, new coat of paint, no one here could possibly have supported that bad old coat of paint, I mean how archaic do you think we are?

And Evangelical Christianity is no different. Hence why there are few direct calls for the inherent goodness of slavery or the perfidy of the Irish in sermons these days.

The script plays right into the hands of the clever, deliberate gay agenda for transforming Western society.

So wait, if these powerful non-existent gay sorcerers can actually bend the mind of God, then why the fuck are you worrying about some yahoos in Utah? The queers can make the Lord of All Creation dance to Lady Gaga on his little puppet-strings. I think we can safely say that the gays have well and truly checkmated you on this day (and how).

Blind leading the blind

The LDS church’s migrating position on gays stems in large measure from the inordinate value Mormons place on formal education. Unusually authoritarian as a society, Mormonism is naturally inclined to rely on respected authorities in academia’s behavioral sciences for guidance

Oh yes, kiddies, it’s our good friend IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION. Oh, how we missed you while you were gone.

The origin of gender

Oh this should be good.

No matter the merits of such doctrine to non-Mormons, this official teaching of the church disallows any notion that gays are “born” gay. The LDS doctrine of “pre-mortal” existence requires acceptance of the belief that all males and all females lived as such “before the world was,” and that God placed male spirits in male bodies on earth when the time was right, and did the same for females, respectively.

Since there is no scriptural doctrine in the LDS canon that God is a prankster, or that He makes inadvertent mistakes, any suggestion that males occasionally end up in female bodies, and vice versa, is heretical — if not outright apostasy from the scriptural doctrines of the church.

God NEVER makes mistakes like putting a person in the wrong sexed body! EVER! Other mistakes God NEVER makes? Creating a non-viable embryo in a woman’s body. Fatal Genetic Disorders. The popularity of Justin Bieber.

And let’s not even get into the existence of those born into a body that is not easily assignable as either male or female.

Yeah, I guess it’s easy to view the world we live in as a flawless clock expertly planned as long as you clamp your hands over your ears and sing really loudly every time it makes a painfully loud grinding noise and winds back 3 hours.

But hey, why let me get you down, I’m one of those non-existent groups of people you nonetheless obsess over and hate for no reason.

Even worse, to deliberately redefine God’s creation of man and woman to match the unscientific rationalizations of behavioral science is the height of profane insult

Science. You’re doing it wrong.

Seriously, they are so desperate for the accuracy rating of science that they borrow the language even when it makes no fucking sense like here.

warranting God’s condemnation if the scriptures are believable regarding human nature.

Wah! Our God hates the existence of people who confuse us about our presuppositions on how the world works! Go away nasty peoples that challenge us! And boo any religion that doesn’t jump on the Denial Express with us.

God hasn’t decreed that the “sacred powers of procreation” be employed only between members of the opposite sex; rather, He has so designed our bodies that no other exercise of such powers is even possible!

Persons of either sex can’t “employ the sacred powers of procreation” with others of their own kind in any way, on any basis, by order of God-ordained reality. Members of the same sex can misuse their bodies and their sexuality — but they can’t truly “exercise the powers of procreation.” They’re intrinsically impotent.

In LDS leaders’ eagerness to sound profound before “the world,” they overlooked this thoughtless error and published something irretrievably silly.

God doesn’t say silly things, of course, but sometimes LDS leaders do — as in this case, where they proclaim it’s wrong for gays to procreate. I caught the absurdity the first time I read the Proclamation when it was released in 1995.

Oh this section is just precious.

He’s going to huff and he’s going to puff and he’s going to lord it over how silly that foolish religious idiot is believing such complete and utter nonsense. How silly could they be to do that, what ho ho.

And bonus ironygasms on the way he just strides up to the sex-phobic euphemism and chides it in an overly literal way before faceplanting himself on the fact that there’s a fuckton more to sex than just the creation of children (not to mention that vile nasty science has made fucking hardly necessary for that anymore).

Now that’s ironic, and amusing.

Indeed.

Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose. (emphasis added)

Pretty straightforward.

That is indeed…a word.

In the beginning, therefore — meaning the beginning of pre-mortal “spiritual” existence — God created male and female, and nothing in between, bisexual, homosexual, transgender, or otherwise gender-challenged.

That’s not how… any of that… sigh… at least I know understand a little more of why my uncle kept trying to insist that since I was undergoing transition, I must be bisexual. Or I would if that still wasn’t batshit nonsense.

Such “identity and purpose” was divinely chosen and assigned. Thereafter, God’s selection of gender for all persons, being divinely-chosen, was meant to remain fixed throughout each individual’s earth life and all eternity.

And lo it is that our earthy vessel is but a form for our immortal spirits, for it is that spirit, the internal reality of the mind and its god-given assurances of truth, that should be respected and seen as the truth above all. Though the outward face of the vessel may seem to us different than what we’ve been raised to expect from that inward self, God’s truth shines through and-

Oh I’m sorry for actually expecting internal consistency from these bigots. I guess all that blah blah blah about the mind being the house of the spirit and our flesh being disposable examples of sin fly right out the window once it comes to accepting a trans* person’s gender. Just like how all the blather about the goodness of celibacy and living a chaste life go right out the window when it’s an asexual woman talking to her pastor about why she has no plans to marry (yeah, there are more than a few asexuals who were immediately told that God’s most important commandment was to be fruitful and multiply when they came out to their pastors).

It’s almost like all these “divine-inspired” Holy Laws that you’ve lived your life by since last Thursday are just hastily cobbled together excuses for your bigotries coated in the language of a divine authority so it can sound like someone more important than you shares your exact prejudices and doesn’t think you should ever grow as a person.

How very convenient that belief system is.

God did not “mess up” and place a female spirit in a male body, or the reverse.

NO! NO ERRORS! EVER EVER EVERVEVRVERVEVR! WAAHHHHHHHHHHH! Mommy, the mean non-existent trannies are confronting me with the illogic of my supposedly divine inspired bigotry again! Make them stop, mommy! It’s unfair! Make them go away so I never have to accept that I live in a chaotic universe ruled by chance and if I ever want to have a world where mistakes and cruelties are not allowed to propagate, then I’ll have to actually make it happen myself often by angering a lot of powerful people and taking some legitimate risks for other people! WAHHHHHHH!

Even the very thought that such self-evident truth might have loopholes, exceptions, or errors is patently evil and inconceivable, considering the divine source of all assigned gender.

Yeah, that’s right. Not only am I the non-existent puppet master of God, but I am in fact a being of pure evil, “existing” solely to make holy men question their inane assumptions about reality and gender even though that and I am impossible.

Fear me, for I am Cerberus, destroyer of worlds! Mother of the unending night! Fear me and repent! First we’ll turn your boy scouts gay! Then we’ll turn them into girls! Next, the world! And all as prophesied in the unholy manual of World’s End:

The Gay Agenda.

The Proclamation ends (after admonishing all persons to fulfill their obligations to God and their families) by saying,

[W]e warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets [that is, Mormon leaders].

In other words, put bluntly, given the obvious thrust of the document, civilization itself depends on healthy, moral-based, one-man/one-woman traditional marriage. Succumbing to the gay agenda will destroy families, and with that destruction, all that is good and essential in society.

No doctrinally-informed, moral person could deny such obvious truth.

…Yes, obvious… What with the nonexistent gays fighting for nonexistent rights, somehow causing straight families to disintegrate… in a way that isn’t already done in the way religious parents are encouraged to disown their children for coming out as queer in some way… that’s… logic… yeah, sure, let’s roll with that.

You just keep fighting that good fight there Cap’n.

…

But know that all your struggles are for naught, for nigh the morn of the fulfillment of the 6th prophecy of Gay Agenda will soon come to pass! The Boy Scouts may eventually think about maybe joining the 21st century on an issue you have long since lost and will only continue to slide into greater and greater irrelevancy to the point where not even your home-grown staff of shut-ins and asylum residents will support you.

And then lo, in veritas, on that endless night, a trillion rainbow-flag wearing locusts will descend and swallow you whole.

As it was written in the Gay Agenda, amen!

*No, really.

Stephen Stone, RA President

This is the crazy that all the other Renew America descends from. Like a single-cell bacteria of religious batshittery.

Sally Zelikovsky, American Idiot:
Obama thinks liberals are stupid

Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. BENGHAZI!!!!!

It’s been pretty painfully obvious what the money men have been ordering all the winged monkeys to rant about for their wingnut welfare as of late. In possibly the most obvious case of manufacturing a story out of nothing in… well, months… maybe, every Tom, Dick, and Hairy Nut Sack on every wingnut blog has been cranking out post after post about Benghazi and how this is totally going to impeach Obama.

Which is impressive, because if Benghazi were any less of the story, it’d be… well, probably the oh noes, IRS looked into a Tea Party organization story that some of the more desperate wingnuts are hoping will lead to impeachment. And all attempts to manufacture something out of this story just make me think more and more about the genuine intelligence failures that lead to 9/11 or the various cover-ups done about the intelligence for ginning up support for the Iraq War and torture. Which, of course it should, seeing as how the only reason that wingnuts are pretending to care is a) out of open revenge for how liberals commented on that shit during Bush’s term and b) because having finally accepted the reality of a black president, they are now committed to manufacturing whatever BS excuse they can to impeach him away.

So, unless the wingnuts come up with something spectacularly batshit, this will be my one and only post on this made-up non-story, because fuck right-wingers getting to dictate the national “topic du jour” whenever they damn well want just by being loud and crazy.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• My dear, foolish, liberals, I have proved my intellect fierce on this day for I have noted the impossibility of someone knowing that something was terrorism and saying so and then later, by which I mean, the same sentence, not know who did it or why they did it. And as we know, when it’s terrorism, it’s impossible to not know who did something and why if we know it occurred. QED.

Which yeah. That’s pretty much it.

And what makes it even more amazing is that this article was written AFTER the Boston Marathon bombing in which everyone, including right-wing websites like the American Thinker, knew that it was terrorism but didn’t know how or why they did it until days afterward.

I mean, I can understand writing an article like that back when Benghazi first happened… maybe… if you had suffered a traumatic brain injury. But a handful of weeks after the Boston Massacre and I’m left wondering if this was just sitting in the can waiting for when the marching orders to pretend to give a fuck were passed down or if that Daily Show joke about conservatives being unable to remember history beyond a week is sadly, true.

And yes, for added fail they quoted the president saying this:

“The Day after it happened I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.”

“What we have been very clear about throughout, was that immediately after this event had happened we were not clear who exactly had carried it out, how it had occurred, what the motivations were. It happened at the same time we had seen attacks on the US Embassy in Cairo as a result of this film.”

“Nobody understood exactly what was taking place during the course of those first few days.”

“Suddenly, three days ago, this gets spun up as if there’s something new to the story. There’s no “there” there.

And followed it up by saying this:

Obama claims to have known the day after the attacks that they were an act of terrorism. (He’s claiming that his Rose Garden comments about terrorism in general amount to a statement that the attacks were terror-related, but this is not the case. However, for the sake of, ahem, clarity, let’s assume it is.) So, thus far, we have:

Day After. Obama. Terrorism.

But, immediately after it happened he wasn’t clear who did it, how it occurred and the motivation. So:

Immediately After. Obama. Unclear.

Obama knew it was terrorism the day after, but immediately after, it wasn’t clear. When exactly does “immediately after the attack” begin and end before it becomes the “day after”? Isn’t the “day after” it happened pretty much the same as “immediately after” it happened?

And somehow she thinks this will reflect poorly on Obama, because… conservatives really are that stupid.

But hey, why stop there. If this is the only post I’m going to be doing on this non-story, might as well crack all the nuts.

Bonus Paid Whore

Rich Lowry, National Pretense:
Benghazi Patsy

I lied when I said there were two main reasons that the wingnuts were circling around Benghazi. There are three. And the third is absolute reflexive anger at the notion that the actions that wingnuts take could possibly have any meaningful consequences. So when it seemed at the time like the Benghazi attacks were connected to related protests about a piece of right-wing Christian hate about Muslims produced by one of the Evangelical psychopaths we’re so damn good at manufacturing, it made all the other Evangelical psychopaths a wee might twitchy and self-introspective.

And Bob-damnitt, they will never ever forgive Obama for ever making them think about the consequences of their actions.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Free Mumia! I mean, that guy who violated his parole in unnecessary fashion in order to make a hate film about muslims that he didn’t even have the balls to stand behind with his real name.

Yeah, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is a right-wing hero now for daring to make a cheap little propaganda flick about the evils of muslims in order to fleece the Evangelical rubes. Which given some of the right-wing hero choices of late like Anders Breivik and George Zimmerman, this is sadly a step up for them.

And since wingnuts apparently only love law-and-order when it’s being used to illegally detain brown people and hate it when it actually responds to illegal activity by rich people or honorary conservatives, they’ve decided that Nakoula being busted for straight-up violating his parole on 8 separate occassions is somehow a moral outrage.

A parole which was part of a laughingly tiny sentence for multi-million dollar bank fraud in which he was convicted in 2010, but was already out and wandering around being a dickwaffle by 2012 and in which he was supposed to not use the internet without permission or use a fake name again (both easy things to avoid that he failed amazingly thoroughly in order to make his hate video).

But if you hear the wingnuts wail, you’d think he was the last of the true political prisoners, jailed for merely speaking truth to power with a journalist’s eye. No seriously:

You won’t find that anywhere in the charges against him, of course. As a practical matter, though, everyone knows that Nakoula wouldn’t be in jail if he hadn’t produced a video crudely lampooning the prophet Mohammed.

Violations of parole would never be enforced if they weren’t punishing him for having the rare wit to rant about the evils of Islam for an hour. And he’s serious about that…

Which I guess makes sense. Conservatives have repeatedly demonstrated that they earnestly believe that laws simply should not apply to “their tribe” of rich conservative assholes. And I can only imagine the outcry if a poor black writer even loosely approximated saying the same.

The second is that he has a history of fraud. A few years ago, he was sentenced to nearly two years in jail on bank-fraud charges. Using a false name, Nakoula gulled actors into appearing in his video on the pretense that it was a desert epic. He is not going to win any good-citizenship awards, and he violated the terms of his probation by using an alias (something Nakoula admits).

A violation of probation, though, usually produces a court summons and doesn’t typically lead to more jail time unless it involves an offense that would be worth prosecuting in its own right under federal standards. Not for Nakoula.

Since when? You go on parole as a “good behavior” thing (usually accomplished by claiming you found Jesus in prison) in lieu of serving out the rest of your term. If you fuck that up by immediately returning to the behavior that got you tossed in jail in the first place, you are sent right back to prison to serve out the rest of your sentence. That’s the fucking point of parole.

But hey, I guess parole violations are another thing that’s OKIYAR.

And I lied again earlier when I said there were three reasons. There are actually four

Shorter Every Other Wingnut in the Jungle:

• Wah! Benghazi was supposed to be our Iran Hostage Crisis preceding a glorious new Reagan era in The Smiler and his unholy reign. And you fucking liberals cock-blocked us. We would have totally won if you hadn’t cock-blocked us, so ipso facto, you cheated and we ipso facto, actually won the election, so depart naer do well and apologize to your white proper master for not letting him steal the election as he was supposed to.

And since this is pretty much the real shorter of the other three reasons as well, this is why I can’t be bothered to waste any more neurons on this made-up bullshit.

And the irony is I wouldn’t even give a fuck about these constant pity parties if they weren’t constantly working to make the shitty lives of various minority groups even shittier.

W.F. Price, Not At All Compensating for Our Penis Head:
A NY Times Mother’s Day Op-ed: Trannies are Equal Moms

The denial of privilege is a very common thread in wingnut posts. Which makes perfect sense. If one can deny that one is more advantaged than other groups, you can imagine that your social advantages are due to inherent internal ability (i.e. you have a better job, easier life, etc… because of being super smart or better at life) rather than exploiting oppression. It also helps alleviate guilt when you enforce unfair or oppressive systems, because you’re not kicking the people below you on the ladder, you’re just standing up for the way the world naturally is, which is why it constantly needs to be enforced with legal and social backlash… wait, what?

Jeffrey T. Brown, American Schmuck:
Like the IRS Scandal? You’ll Love Obamacare

But of course, in a world where relative social benefits flow like eternal ice cream into the cups of the privileged groups (i.e. a world where dominating all media attention, all participation, and all control is seen as normal), there inevitably comes a time when a spare drop falls on an oppressed group. Maybe there is a historic first professional sports player or a historic rights bill gets passed or maybe a news media story or television show is focusing on someone other than a dominant group member for an episode. Whatever it is, for the person used to pretending that the current inequal state is a perfect equality, it seems like a disruption of the natural order. Something unfair to them.

Kyle Smith, New York is an Unwilling Host:
Gag Order

Matt “I Swear I Only Look at Gay Porn for Research” Barber, Renew Erection:
Memo to Christian Troops: “We’ve Got Your Back”

Robert VerBruggen, National White Supremacist:
Heritage was Wrong

Thus, we are, from time to time, “treated” to a particular variation on the conservative whine about privilege and oppression. A pure tantrum by a dominant group, not just denying their advantages, but trying to pretend that it is actually they who are the aggrieved minority whose important struggles are ignored by the media. That they are the ones whose lives are harder just for being a dominant group, the ones suffering societal oppression. And often there is an unspoken (or sometimes far too spoken) belief in these posts of… well…

Shorter Myopic Assholes Everywhere:

• Wah! Our lives would be so much relatively better if we were oppressed minority group instead of boring old “safe to hate” dominant group. If we were the real minority group, then we’d finally have the moral high ground we so desperately crave.

(With a bonus point if they invoke the dread spectre of “political correctness” to make their point without a hint of irony or awareness that “political correctness” just means not being a deliberate asshole unless you want people to notice you are a deliberate asshole)

And to every instance of these writers, I say this:

No you don’t.

You don’t actually want to live even a fraction of the lives of a real minority group, to suffer even a picoliter of the bullshit and oppression that minority groups face every day. Fuck, you couldn’t even begin to withstand the fear and pain it takes to actually change society enough to be a place where a minority group can live safely and equally.

And yes. I get that most of these chuckleheads don’t really sample their own product on this. That it is in essence, a fantasy they sell themselves and their followers in order to justify the horrible things they do to minority members, the oppression they help enact in their daily lives. For all the blather about how “lucky” welfare recipients are, there isn’t a rich conservative in the world who would legitimately swap places with them and “enjoy” all that supposed free money without effort while letting the lower-class “mooch” learn how truly difficult it is to write poorly sourced bullshit once a week for a 6 figure paycheck.

But they still want to do their little dance every time a minority group starts getting a shred of dignity and pretend like their little group of over-privileged assholes is the Queen of Daniel getting eaten by Lions Mountain. And it’s so easy to do so because our society is designed to make relative social power invisible largely by the efforts of said douchebags to treat their privileges as “normal and right” and to help discourage minorities speaking up about their life experiences in public.

And thus, I’d like to take a quick deviation from my usual format and hammer home just how incredibly shitty it is to be a minority group member in today’s America.

Assorted wingnuts and crybabies, you know what life is like for you? All the little ways you’ve made your lives worse by promoting policies to screw the little guy that ended up screwing you too? Imagine that, but everything is suddenly unnecessarily ten or a hundred times more difficult. Because for all minority groups may talk about specific injustices, it’s worth noticing that this occurs on a backdrop of how life already sucks for everyone else.

Take for instance, getting fired without a social safety net. Sucks pretty hard for any American with the massive stress about how fast your savings might run out, having to go through the rigmarole of searching for a new job, update your resume, and so on and all because you had an asshole boss or your work wasn’t quite enough to stand out from the pack.

Now imagine that the reason you got axed wasn’t about trying to fuck the secretary or calling the big client an asshole, but it was because you wouldn’t sleep with your boss. Or that you were the best at your job in the whole company and were widely recognized for it, but your bosses decide that you have to go because you’re the wrong race, sexuality, or gender identity and no matter your performance, they don’t want to risk putting off what they imagine old white men in suits think.

Imagine in searching for that new job that every single accomplishment you have will be viewed as 20-50% less impressive just because of how your name sounds or what gender you are. Imagine having to figure out how much to downplay your last employment because they know you by the wrong name or gender and might reveal something to interviewers. Imagine having to bleach your skin or go in drag to your interviews knowing that if you get the position, you’ll have to do that every day hence.

Imagine further that there is no savings to last a couple of months on. That if you don’t find a job by the end of the week, you will end up homeless or without food for a month. Imagine that you could end up homeless or without food even when you are working 40+ hours a week. Imagine that you don’t have a long list of industry-relevant experience because when you entered the job market, the economy was shitty enough that entry level positions required 5 years experience. Imagine you only have a small stream of under-employment complete with various gaps to show for yourself.

Even more, imagine trying to job search while actually homeless, where every single employer looks at your PO Box home address as a symbol for “lazy and untrustworthy” regardless of your qualifications. Imagine how much stressful all of this is.

Actually, scratch that, you tend to suck at that. So instead think of this. You’re going to interviews so depressed that the world seems in a fog. You can’t focus on things and you’re forgetting more than usual. Every morning it’s difficult to wake up or really sit down to work and every fiber of your being is calling for you to curl up into a fetal position and give up. Your hands are shaking, your back is seizing up, you’re choking for no physiological reason and you can’t ever see a doctor about it because if you do it’ll bankrupt your family for generations.

You’re also driving a car on its last legs and if it dies, well you’re just fucked because there ain’t no way you can afford to replace it or repair it. Or maybe you have to fill out applications by the dying light of a cell phone in the backseat of your car, which will be your room for the night and every night hence. But do it quick if you don’t want to die out on the streets, especially with winter fast approaching.

And you can’t ever stop for an instance, take a vacation and clear your head, because if you did you’re going to end up without food or shelter and may very well end up dead by either exposure or suicide.

But hey, money is what it is, but if you have the love and support (especially that support, financial or housing support in times of transition can be literally the difference between scrapping with the dogs in the street and having a warm bed) of your family, you can carry through, right?

Yeah, thanks largely to people like you, that’s hardly something a number of groups can count on. Did you have to acknowledge that you’re an atheist? That you’re gay? Heaven forbid that you are trans*? Or poly? Or a sex worker? Welp, then more often than not, say goodbye to that family.

Also, note that this will often work in concert with job and life discrimination. Are some assholes ranting about how people like you are evil sinners who are destroying the world because “their faith”? Well, that’s used to justify the cowardice of employers and their willingness to get rid of you in illegal fashion in case those mean haters spend less money on their company’s products because of some filthy faggot or tranny. And then that discrimination is used to justify more. Hey, being that minority group seems to net you fewer job opportunities, more on-the-job discrimination where your job performance doesn’t matter, worse treatment by society. What must you have been thinking to choose that lifestyle? I guess people like you just aren’t qualified for whatever reason. What reason could that be? I dunno, but let’s pick one and use it to justify doing the same to anyone like them down the road.

Fewer latin@s and blacks are in the boardrooms than there should due to discrimination? They must be inherently stupid, that’s why we can’t promote them. Fewer women feel safe going to our conferences because of harassment? They must be foreign invaders on the subject and must be treated as such with more harassment. A trans* person is being discriminated out of a job and people are ignorant on queer issues? Well, it must be because they sabotaged their life and career and frankly why should we support someone whose life is in a tailspin.

Know why this touching letter of support for a gay son went viral across the internet?

Because most letters from one’s parent when one is queer look more like this*:

So I’ve been hearing about your last few conversations with Uncle. Boy, have you dug yourself into a shithole. Let’s recap: so far in 2013 you’ve torpedoed your career, alienated your uncle, and sent your mom into therapy. Well done.

I firmly believe in second chances, and taking responsibility for your actions. If you think your life is heading in the right direction then by all means – tally ho! But if you see it as the train wreck it’s become, and you maybe want to talk, let me know. I’ll be in Location next week and we can meet up. But just you, no Partner (one piece of free advice: she’s your Iago, and best you realized this before you wake up and wonder where all the blood came from).

Also, “talk” in this context doesn’t mean you get to tell me how you’re “transgender” (which is bullshit) or how all your problems are caused by external forces (double bullshit) or that studies show blah blah blah. This is the kind of talk where you get told to man up, and how I might help. Just so we’re clear.

Cerberus, your mom and I love you very much. It’s time you decided to love yourself as well.

You know how to reach me.

Dad

And even when they are trying to be supportive, are more likely to contain lines like**:

In fairness if Partner loves you and has your dick and balls removed you should have her cut off her clitoris so you two would be “sexually” equal. Just a thought.

To love someone so much you would mutilate yourself and your lover is pushing you to that end is not a sign of a great relationship. You played many fantasy games as kid but you are old enough now to understand the real world from fantasy. What kind of sexual relation do you have with Partner? Do you fornicate or has she reduced you to a limp dick confused about who you are?

But wait! There’s more!

Work and family are just a piece. There’s also society at large. Surely it is here that those assorted dominant groups are the most hard-done. I mean, they have to deal with… people treating their dominant group membership as a given… and also having terrible things they say get reacted to poorly by the people they dehumanize and demean… and let’s not forget the way people say MEAN THINGS by noting that other people like them have unearned relative privileges or have supported the continued oppression of minority groups.

Certainly getting called out for bigotry is so much worse than:

1) Living in a world where you and everyone like you are not just casually assumed to be the sex class and thus open-season for rape and molestation to the point where it is actually hard to find a fellow-group member who hasn’t been raped in some way. But then, also living in a world where rapists are constantly publicly cried over, because “they didn’t deserve to have their lives ruined over a mistake” even when they ruin someone else’s life. And one where no matter how brutal and obvious the rape, there’ll always be someone there to blame you for it.

Oh, and just in the very likely case that you’re one of those people devoted to minimizing rape and sexual violence against women, here’s some of the lifestyle changes that rape often entails for the victim. You’ll get to enjoy: Constant ‘nam style flashbacks to the scene of the attack, internalized hatred constantly seeking a way it was your fault by ignoring red flags or not speaking up enough, giant triggers around areas of your body or non-sexual activities (hey, have you ever wanted your entire right thigh to feel like a creepy-crawling zone of intense panic and fear unless you squashed it up against the couch at random intervals? Look no further!), random fits of unfocused rage or deep depression, TRIGGERS! Lots and lots of triggers about everything (Did your rapist once eat an english muffin? Enjoy having that turn into a day-destroying source of pain and frustration), a lowered ability to enjoy sex in general (hey, it’s not like you were using that ability to get hard without weeping uncontrollably anyways), problematic intimacy with your main romantic partner (hey, being able to cuddle your partner or sleep in the same bed without occasionally kicking them in the head in blind fear was overrated anyways!), and of course all those various depression symptoms we were talking about in the work section. Bonus points if you’re going through the flashbacks during the job discrimination like I did. Ever called in sick because you were stressed out and needed a day? Yeah, I didn’t get to have any of those. And I had to perform like I was manically happy every day I was at work. FUN!

2) Living in a world where the color of your skin marks you as an expendable criminal no matter your behavior in real life. Imagine, white people, that you are a butcher going home on the train because it’s a convenient way to get home. Two idiots are fighting and you break it up. So a man puts you on the ground, restrained and puts a bullet in your head and no one expects him to do anything other than walk, because he’s a white police officer and you are a black man. Imagine that the police felt fully comfortable confiscating any evidence of their execution, but even with that evidence, they still walk. Imagine that your kid is walking home and a black man shot him dead on the street after stalking him and the cops who have all the details not only refuse to arrest the man but actively work to compromise any case that could be made against him. You pretty much can’t imagine that outside of some weird Batman or Punisher comic, but in our world, you made the shooter your national hero and whine about how you’re not allowed to tamper with the state’s witnesses to further hurt the case.

Imagine being a national hero, the one man brave enough to solve a decade’s old case and rescue our most precious national resource: blond, white children. Imagine that even then, as the cops and news media circle to congratulate you, being so used to a system where a police siren means unnecessary harassment or premature death, that a police siren nearly makes you have a heart attack on camera. And where you yourself have trouble processing yourself as anything other than a villain because that’s the most common depiction of you in media.

3) Living in a world where society’s opinion is simply that you deserve to die and that anyone who can aid this process should be complimented and cheered. Where the suicide rates for your population are nearly 1 in 3 and over 50% attempt. Where no one feels even a moment of conscience for letting their glee over trying to destroy you shine. Where people regularly get more money than you’ll ever see in your life for saying that everyone like you deserves to die. Where that isn’t the viewpoint of some crazy on the street, but rather a majority opinion. One where your population has the highest percentage of hate crimes and murders based on your identity committed against you. Where you having the right to pee in public is seen as a taut societal issue.

Imagine that people feel fully justified in denying you housing, aid, or employment, even if it’s against the law, no matter if you are able to afford it or are highly qualified. That when you walk down the street, being looked at with mild contempt is fairly common even if you’re not making a big show of your identity.

And again, let’s make it easy for the empathy impaired. This is the common reaction to minor shit. It’s like if you just wore a subtle little inch long cross in a chain under your shirt and by doing so expected that 1 in 5 people on the street will look at you as if you were a cross between a serial killer and a child molester. By doing so you expected that most jobs will find an excuse not to hire you and most jobs you belong to will try to eliminate you no matter your quality. Or that by doing so you were blocked from using the restroom. No imagine it’s not a necklace, but something you can’t hide. For a population that whines when a business owner loses federal aid when they try and oppress other minorities, I don’t need to guess that a day in this life would break you like Batman’s back in a famous 90s era comic.

That people would actually try and manufacture a system where you were in fact encouraged to commit suicide because that way you weren’t “inconveniencing normal people”.

Oh and let’s throw on the final over-privileged tantrum. Media depiction.

Oh noes, men are sometimes depicted as goofballs… and also nearly 100% of all heroes in every form of media anywhere. Iconic characters in one medium like a comic book or tv show will happily be translated to another medium like movies without people trying to downplay or destroy what you loved about them because by depicting a strong female hero, they’re instantly “controversial” or “uninteresting”. And they never ever get treated like the reward for the hero that he wins for doing a good job. And they get to be praised when they do heroism in real life, unlike women when they do something brave like save elementary school kids from a gunman, who get half a mention, if that.

Oh noes, white people are… well depicted in every form of way imaginable, while black and brown characters get to exist as thugs, support characters, and stereotypes! Yeah, that’ll totally help those watching them feel like they exist and matter and those depictions will never ever be used constantly by conservatives to argue that black and brown people in real life must be treated as if they were all movie and tv stereotypes. They certainly will never react in anger and disbelief when a prominent black or brown person turns out to fulfill none of the proscribed stereotypes and is successful on their own terms. And they’ll never ever deal with this dissonance by trying to scream that the person actually is all the stereotypes simply because they can’t handle a successful black or brown person being their own person.

Oh noes, Christians are depicted occasionally as small-minded bullies in fiction because their most proud and public face in reality is the small-minded bullying of queer people and women. That’s so much worse than being barely depicted at all, and when you are, you’re depicted almost universally as sex-obsessed psychotic killers or pathetic jokes lost in self-delusion. To such an extent in fact, that the most common public perception of the real people separate from the fiction is in fact, that, which is then in turn used to justify real discrimination and bigotry in the real world against real, non-fictional people.

And then, let’s bring up social rights. All those fights and parades and historic laws and first X Ys. You know why we constantly have those headline grabbing stuff?

Because we don’t have it now.

Because we didn’t have it for generations beforehand. When we fight for gay marriage, it’s because our relationships with our loved ones, something you take for granted, are treated as jokes unworthy of all the protections you can gain by simply driving down to Las Vegas in a drunken haze. When we fight for the right of brown people to walk down the street unmolested, it’s because they don’t have the right that every white person walking their dog or jogging down the street takes for granted. When we cheer the first atheist or Buddhist legislator, it’s because the other couple of hundred are all out Christians who often try and make not being Christian a punishable offense. When we have to stand up and “come out” about our experiences with rape or needing to undergo a common and legal medical operation, it’s because there are whole movements dedicated to shaming anyone who does.

It’s just not on the same level. No matter how much you might try and delude yourself that you’re as much a victim of the system or having one person calling you a douchenozzle somehow equals unrelenting and overpowering hatred from every corner making every task more difficult, it’s just not true.

And what makes it worse, is that the struggle to fix inequality, real inequality, is a genuine martyr’s game.

Every single goddamn time, a right that in a few generations is seen as a no duh that everyone must have supported, is won by people taking a risk and being seen visibly as speaking out on or being something despised and oppressed and being tortured over it. The right for people to work was built by people being visible at work and being fired for it until that happened less and less. The right for people to be themselves in public was won by people being murdered, hated, or looked down upon and having to gamble their lives everyday, often for the worse. The right for people to have basic human dignities we take for granted today began with people being murdered for it, beaten for it, having their name turned into a universal synonym for scum, and often sacrificing their right to ever be employed or treated as anything other than an enemy by the majority of the population.

And if any minority member wanted a world where they had that equal treatment and didn’t want to be discriminated against, it meant they had to sacrifice themselves on that track. Take the risk, be public, be burned, have to gamble on basic survival, often lose, because without those people being out there and changing that public ignorance, fear, and inherited bigotry, there is nothing to humanize them, make things better, make a world where they could be free and supported.

And you can be damn well sure that a lot of bigots understand that. It’s why that backlash is brutal and unrelenting. Because they know that if they can scare enough minority members from being visible, from taking that first step, from risking themselves by simply being themselves, then they can buy a few more years where simply not being that feared “other” can be an invitation for unearned rewards and where ignorance and hate are seen as “proper values”.

And it’s the loss of this, most of all, is what leads these smug sonuvabitches to mewl like wounded kittens about the fictional loss of a meaningless expectation. Of a mere request on people to be mindful of other people, try and use some basic empathy, and try not to make their already shitty oppressed lives any worse. And to try and minimize and victim blame all they can on that before trying to steal even the not-at-all-worth-it moral high ground and underdog story as well.

Because a world in which anyone not a white cis straight christian male from the middle or upper class tax brackets is given even the slightest hint of anything is one that assholes will fight to the death to uphold and then two generations later deny fighting at all.

And for those of us continually caught in the thresher’s teeth, desperately trying to find a way to survive another day, much less another week, it’s getting harder and harder to even fake sympathy for all you fuckers and your “but I swear I’m the jew of Minority Fascism” bullshit.

*Actual email from my father, names changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike.

**Excerpts from actual email from my uncle***.

***I know I used a number of personal examples, but what makes it worse is that my story isn’t in fact remarkable in any way and may in fact be better than what a lot of trans* people are dealing with. I would have gladly stuck to the more universal examples if I didn’t have so fucking many life experiences that resonated with the response that the posts that prompted this rant demanded. Fuck anyone who ever even thinks about saying that being this way is some grand old choice because sometimes occasionally institutions try and do a tiny little bit to fix the damage. It’s pretty much like trying to blow up rescue helicopters working to save people trapped by rising floods, because you didn’t get a ride up to your roof last summer to repair the storm tiles and thus it’s unfair that anyone ever get a “free ride” on a helicopter. And for those of us drowning, we look at you fucks about the same way you’d look at a person who did that****.

****I mean, sheesh, you wonder why people have slowly learned to hate you simply for “speaking your mind”.

*****Just consider this a footnote for the entire post, but all of these oppressions would hit a fuckton less if we actually were allowed to have a functional safety net in place. Being disowned by family members wouldn’t matter if you were always guaranteed a roof and a meal. Being discriminated out of a job wouldn’t matter with a guaranteed living wage that made it possible to use the free market to legitimately punish workplaces that discriminated by allowing the discriminated against to form rival companies and bleed off all the non-bigots. Being hated in public wouldn’t matter if the legal protections for minority groups had real enforcement that ensured that no one slipped through the cracks. Which is sort of the real reason that conservatives are so anti-safety-net. If people could be themselves without living in fear for what that might mean to their job prospects, familial support, or ability to survive in the world, then they’d simply do so, forcing everyone to see and discover that minority group members aren’t actually the evil monsters they’ve been led to believe, which would lead to even further social growth away from the archaic social values that conservatives love to cling to. And no, I don’t at all forgive them for casually condemning so many people to misery and death simply because they don’t want to have to grow up like the goddamn adults they pretend to be. And that’d be true even if I wasn’t one of the ones in the rubbish bin.

For what it’s worth, didn’t have any sense there was a reason to be concerned.

Yeah, you hold that gun real high there, champ. That’ll prove your masculinity isn’t a glass flower, ready to shatter at the slightest cough.

Kevin D. Williamson, National Enraged Grue:
Frank Rich Is Wrong about Civil Rights

All right, let’s play a quick game of make-believe. Okay, let’s say you are a hack, specifically hired by a pack of racist dickweasels to help obfuscate the terrible social ills your party and ideology have foisted upon the world, especially against minority groups. Sure, every single post you write is a direct cash-in of your soul, a painfully obvious whitewashing of recorded history for the purpose of encouraging the continued ignorance of wannabe-intelligent dumb white hicks from the suburbs in ways that will continue to deny black people long delayed civil rights and public recognition as full human beings. It may be a terrible job, but hey, some whores weren’t born with a gifted mouth if you know what I mean.

Then imagine someone in the sane world notices and calls attention to the fact that you are a cheap sell-out deliberately trying to trade misinformation about black history in service to a squadron of historical revisionists without the balls to stand by the conviction of the ideas and actions they fought so hard to preserve and frankly, still fight for to this day. Imagine the pained rage at having your head forced against the mirror eyes locked on exactly what you said you’d never become.

Imagine trying to sputter out a feeble self-defense for your crimes. Imagine it sounds something like this:

Slightly Shorter (or the port looks nice this time of year):

• I shall defend against your scurrilous accusations of rewriting racial history in service to my paymasters by rewriting racial history in accordance to their whim. Did you know that the Party Switcheroo on race didn’t occur around the Civil Rights Act as lying reality might maintain but rather because of a refreshing grape soda in the 90s? Also, the only reason blacks and whites swapped places during the 60s is because blacks are welfare queens willing to part with their humanity and support bigots just for a taste of government dependence and white people are just moral enough to be appalled by that… what’s that? You can see my soul divorcing my body as I speak? How dare you notice that!

Even with that grueling exercise in empathy, is there even a remote chance you don’t want to kick ol’ Kev in the balls until he fully recites the Southern Strategy’s effect in exploiting racism for temporary Republican electoral gains?

It’s also worth noting that Kevin Williamson is on record knowing damn well when the switch over between the parties happened. But hey, if they were intellectually honest, they wouldn’t be conservatives.

Sorry, Superman, there’s no cure. You’re just going to have to punch him repeatedly in the nuts.

Matt Welch, Yet Another Reason to Hate Libertarians:
The Importance of Allowing People to Say That You Can’t Be a Gay Basketball Player and a Christian

Ah Libertarians. The end result of people who really do believe that it doesn’t matter who you are or what you believe, just how you market yourself.

If we want to understand how modern conservatives got to the point where they really seem to think that “better branding” will solve the fact that they’ve spent the last 30 years directly antagonizing everyone who isn’t a rich white cissexual heterosexual male and overall fucking up every aspect of the planet, we need look no farther than “libertarianism”.

Not only is libertarianism in and of itself, a rebranding effort to disguise support of segregation into the modern age as a principled stand for the free market and state’s rights. It is also a testament to how for all its blather of being made up by the “true makers” of society, who claim to deeply understand capitalism and how marketing works, they absolutely fail to take advantage of easy opportunities to lend even minor support to their marketing claims.

Take for instance it’s oft sold “libertarianism matrix” argument that it combines traditionally conservative economics (or economic “liberty”) with socially liberal beliefs. Not only do they fail to stand for this when it would coincide with their supposed small government beliefs (like not supporting the government trying to get all up in women’s uteruses), but they also fail to stand up for easy slam-dunks with increasing social support where it would separate them from traditional conservative beliefs.

Like gay rights. It should be a no-brainer for libertarians who want to take advantage of the fact that conservatism is looking about as palatable as mämmi. Gay rights are starting to earn a majority of social support, thus it wouldn’t be all that outside the bigoted normal, but it would generate a whole bunch of media noise about “how this brand of conservatism is more liberal”. Marketing-wise it’s the easiest lay-up in history. It’s easier to do the right thing than doing certain people’s mothers. And yet, they can’t help it, because at their hearts, libertarians are the same small-minded idiots as the conservative movements that spawned it, or rather…

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• We really need to trumpet ignorant bigotry as an important part of the dialogue for reasons that aren’t because we’re homophobes, like… oh, how it made Martin Luther King Jr a better martyr… Ok, bad example, how about how it forced Jackie Robinson to suffer endless bullshit with a smile on his face lest he make it impossible for any other black athlete to cross over… er… you need to “go slow”?

So yeah, small-minded idiots, passing up the opportunity of a lifetime with the historic coming out of first openly gay American team sports athlete, Jason Collins, by throwing all their support behind… some asshole on ESPN ranting like a cartoon villain about the perfidy of dem queers and what they’re doing to the soil.

Great job there, libertarians, way to stay ahead of the curve.

You have probably heard the news that mediocre but long-lasting NBA backup center Jason Collins

Yeah, I don’t think you’re allowed to damn with faint praise an athlete when you played the easy layup by knocking yourself out on the bottom of the hoop.

today became the first active professional men’s team sports player to come out as gay. Read his Sports Illustrated essay if you haven’t.

See, for instance, I would strongly agree with this. You should read his essay if you haven’t, because sports has always been a deeply homophobic space saddled with a lot of unnecessary toxic masculinity baggage. Solving that problem requires athletes to be brave and not only come out after they’ve long left the sport, but while they are still playing. Only that way will younger athletes feel safe coming out and not think that they’re sacrificing their only chance at a big paycheck by doing so. And it’s also worth reading, because it’s worth it to remember how brave this is in the context of other athletes coming out in other team sports historically being treated very poorly. Take Justin Fashanu who was the only English football player to come out as gay and ended up killing himself at least in part because of the hatred and homophobia other players, coaches, and fans showed him. Or Graeme Le Saux who endured constant homophobic bullying by fans and players despite being straight and married simply because he liked “girly” hobbies like antique collecting. While there are also positive stories like Gro Hammerseng and Katja Nyberg the gold medal winning lesbian Norwegian handball couple, that’s not exactly the dominant narrative hanging over gay athletes deciding whether or not to come out.

And if the libertarians were half as good at marketing as they want to be, their response would simply be “liberals strongly agree with libertarian article on social justice”.

Since then, commentary from his fellow basketball players, from politicians (including President Barack Obama), and from journalists has been overwhelmingly positive (just click on Deadspin and scroll down).

For now. Which is really good and comforting. Coming out shouldn’t always be an invitation for unnecessary pain and suffering. Often times in the first wave, it turns out that way and certainly those of us who have come out as one form of queer or another have our set of scars from the practice.

But the point of going through this rigmarole is to make a world where the majority of coming out stories are met with support either hesitant or enthusiastic. That Jason Collins, in this first wave of responses, is mostly meeting positive responses is good. It will help him the first time a team owner decides to treat him like shit or a teammate comes cussing at him or visiting fans somewhere start a homophobic chant when he comes on. And it will hopefully help make a world where those people who try to start shit are treated as the small-minded bullies they are.

One of the few exceptions has been ESPN commentator Chris Broussard, who said:

Case in point. For all this “enthusiastic support”, there have still been a number of small-minded bigots having public meltdowns over the no-duh announcement that yeah, gays exist in sports, same as anywhere else. And you can see the nuclear meltdown and resulting cleanup of such, not only in the impressively ignorant rant by employed by ESPN commentator, Chris Broussard, but also in the vast number of right-wing articles doing passive-aggressive “why can’t we treat every single Christian athlete as big news to take the spotlight off the icky gays” whines.

So let’s hear the rant that (spoiler warning) prominent libertarian and Jimmy Olsen-lookalike Matt Welch will defend as “an important part of the dialogue” that we’d be poorer for leaving out.

If you’re openly living that type of lifestyle, then the Bible says you know them by their fruits. It says that, you know, that’s a sin. If you’re openly living in unrepentant sin, whatever it may be, not just homosexuality, whatever it may be, I believe that’s walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ. So I would not characterize that person as a Christian because I don’t think the Bible would characterize them as a Christian.

Wah! Mommy! Wah! I wanna impose my narrow-minded cherry-picking vision of Christianity on everyone else and use that to throw out people I find icky for totally not bigoted reasons as well as try and passively argue that only my type of people should be playing this secular ball game. And I want to do this despite being a FUCKING BOBBLE HEAD employed by ESPN to essentially go “losing team should have shown more hustle”.

Seriously, what errant brain fart made this meat head think “gosh, what everyone needs right now are my ignorant as fuck ideas about comparative religion”? And when people are calling out the ignorance of something that was said on an American sports analysis show on ESPN, that’s saying a fuckton. And it would be saying that even if this wasn’t a tired, hackneyed rehash of Evangelical talking points they’ve been recycling for the last 30 years.

Broussard is predictably getting beaten to a rhetoric pulp on Twitter.

Oh, is Broussard getting “beaten to a rhetoric pulp” through the historically awe-inspiring medium of Twitter?

One second, let me play the world’s tinniest fucking violin for him.

Sorry, in a world where Jason Collins is taking a large risk of being actually physically beaten and certainly will end up being fouled harder by certain bigots in the sport and where people who have stood up for basic rights have been stalked and harassed through twitter to the point where they can’t even speak up for themselves anymore, I seem to find my empathy bag completely empty of fucks to give to a man having to deal with minor backlash from saying something intensely dehumanizing and legitimately fucked up and ignorant.

And while I think today is a wonderful, watershed day for people (especially the artist formerly known as Ron Artest) to live as open and free as they wanna be,

Leaving aside the savior comma, there’s just so much fail here in this little piece, that there’s almost nothing left to salvage before it completes its suicide run. Where even to start? Well, there’s the Prince joke, because that’s sure as fuck topical and shows how down libertarians are down with the kids, yo. There’s also the sad little homophobe dig at Metta World Peace (it is now my life-ambition to eventually become as “fuck what the world thinks” as this man). Yes, cause see Jason Collins coming out is really a watershed moment for Metta World Peace to be “as open and free” as he wants to be, IYKWISAIKYD. And fuck the claim to innocence on that phrasing. Metta World Peace shows up to press conferences in a Cookie Monster shirt because he’s a World Class defender and he doesn’t give a fuck. Jason Collins coming out is barely a blip in that guy’s life. And here’s the proof of that.

If it’s a watershed moment for anyone other than the sport, Jason Collins, the fans, and future and current gay NBA players, it’s probably John Amaechi, who was the first NBA player to come out during retirement and has been waiting for a current player to come out for awhile. On that note, I love this quote by him: “Right now there are still people with great power in positions of leadership within politics, within business, who behave like 5-year-olds being touched by a girl for the first time when they talk about gay stuff”. Ha!

I agree with the New York Post editorial Robert George here:

A self-described libertarian ignoring the opportunity to live up to their claims of social liberalism and instead quoting the likes of the New York fucking Post instead? One second, let me take a moment to fake the appropriate amount of surprise.

Oh noes, how could it be that libertarians would be poorly disguised social conservatives who predominantly use conservative news sources for their information?!?

And that’ll be 50 cents… plus postage.

Chris Broussard spoke what more than a few players feel. If such comments aren’t expressed, a real conversation can’t be had.

Yes, we couldn’t possibly have a real conversation about the allowance of the aggrieved minority to finally have a moment to speak about their life experiences if we didn’t include the most ignorant and tired of rehashes of the dominant group’s attempt to enforce conformity.

How in the world could we have a “real conversation” if we allowed the minority group to speak, for once, on their own behalf and from a position of actual knowledge on the subject? And if we actually listened to their life experiences instead of rushing once again towards the eventual minimization of the historic impact and rehashing of old bigotries?

IT’S UNPOSSIBLE!!!!!

One of the fascinating and valuable thing about Jackie Robinson’s 1964 book about baseball desegregation and civil rights,

A “fascinating” and “valuable” thing about Jackie Robinson from the papered over “Segregation Forever” movement… Oh this is going to be a treat.

which I wrote about two weeks ago, was that baseball’s pioneer gave space in his oral history for whites who didn’t agree with the federal civil rights push that Robinson was fighting for.

Probably because it was 1964 and a black man speaking frankly on his own about the incredible amount of bullshit without having to continue to bow and scrape to the ignorant white assholes of the time might as well have been a guy in a dashiki cap waving around a machine gun.

Here, for example, is shortstop-turned redass manager Alvin Dark:

I feel that too many people are trying to solve the Southerners’ problems before they solve their own problems in the North. In Chicago, in New York and other cities where they’re having racial problems—if these problems were solved by the Northerners or people from the West who come down South, if they would take care of their own problems first and let the Southerners work it out I know they would work it out, because there are a lot of people in the South that feel that everyone’s a human being, a son of God, if they are Christians, all born equally. I feel that right now it’s being handled a bit too fast. [...] Being a Christian, I feel that this will be solved one day in the South. But they’re rushing it a little bit too quick right now.

Yes, if we had just left those poor Southerners alone, instead of harrying and hurrying them with our unreasonable requests (and what were we doing trying to fix the South when the North wasn’t yet impeccably perfect), then they totally would have gotten around to giving African-Americans full rights one of these centuries.

I mean, sure, they didn’t even begin to work on the issue on their own in the 100 years after the end of the Civil War and instead spent all that time trying to reinstitute all the legal and illegal barriers they could thrust in front of civil rights in order to try and replace as much of the inequality of the Slavery system as they could (and even after they were forced, have spent the last 50 years trying to expand their racist ass system to the rest of America). But hey, they really would have gotten to it if we’d just respected “state’s rights” enough. Honest! And if you can’t believe in Southern Honor, what can you believe in? Except ghosts and the Easter Bunny.

Now, there is no doubt that Jackie Robinson vehemently disagreed with this go-slow sentiment,

Obligatory Nina Simone reference.

but he also understood that you can’t always persuade fence-sitters through a two-handed chest-shove.*

Is that? Is that an actual footnote? Oh how wonderful, let us explore that bounding cul-de-sac next. And yeah, if you knew fuck-all about Jackie Robinson’s story (and why would you bring him up if you didn’t know fuck-all about him, oh wait, conservative, never mind), you’d know the reason he couldn’t “persuade with a chest-shove” is because he had his fucking hands tied by the “first minority problem”. That is the first X person has to be preternaturally nice, inoffensive, mellow, and a living refutation of every negative stereotype held against that minority group lest the nervous bigoted dominant majority have a freak out and decide that any X minority member that comes after can never be given the opportunity because “oh, it went so badly the first time” or “we were right, they really are all (insert stereotype here)” (it’s one of the big reasons that Obama is so mealy-mouthed and moderate and so careful not to live up to the angry or stupid black stereotypes). And one of the big things about pretty much all notes about Jackie Robinson’s story point out how much that demand weighed on his soul in terms of having to swallow some pretty vicious bigotry with a smile on his face so as not to look “bad tempered”. But hey, reality has a liberal bias and all that.
Now onward, footnote soldiers!

* Interestingly, the same year Robinson’s book was published, Alvin Dark was widely accused of being racist after criticizing his largely minority San Francisco Giants team for making “dumb” plays.

The bigoted Southerner demanding that those uppity black people just needed to wait forever for their rights was accused of bigotry the same year? Gosh, how could that be?

According to this article published by the Society for American Baseball Research, the alleged racist had an important black friend:

Wait… seriously? “Alleged” racist? He was defending the Segregation South and arguing that “things were being too rushed” after a fucking century of stonewalling. I think by any post-Civil Rights Act perspective on his position, or hell, even contemporary perspective we can absolutely conclude that he was racist as shit.

But hey, given that libertarians are the mantle bearers of segregation its pretty obvious why Matt Welch would be hesitant to call segregationists anything more than “alleged” racists (hint, hint, dog whistle about how uppity blacks make up accusations of racism to “smear” totally not-racist honest conservatives).

Well, in his slight defense, the article writer he cites also was fast to bury the accuracy of the notice of racism at the time, but seeing as how he quotes a fucking hagiography (in a hagiography, someone could strangle a puppy on live tv and it would be written about as a “controversial moment” where an “alleged attack took place” but luckily prominent canine once said something positive about him), I’m not tempted to cut him (Dark or Welch) on their transparent racism.

Jackie Robinson quickly rushed to Dark’s defense. The two had been friends since their playing days, and Robinson told the New York Times that he had “known Dark for many years, and my relationships with him have always been exceptional. I have found him to be a gentleman, and above all, unbiased. Our relationship has not only been on the baseball field but off it. We played golf together.”

As noted, hagiographies.

All right, this footnote explored, let’s jump to the next argument on why we need to focus on what ignorant bigots say (but not in a way that actually examines and pushes back bigotry and treats it like a part of the conversation, no no, that’s “blocking an important voice out of the conversation”. Because if it’s conservative it must remain on its own and unfought as the only thing mentioned on the subject otherwise WAH! Silencing debate! FREE SPEECH! WAH!).

And sometimes engaging with the I’m not ready to go that far just yet crowd

That might be the most exceptionally elaborate euphemism for “bigoted disingenuous fuck” I have encountered in my life.

I know I’ve harped on this a lot this post, but it’s worth noting not only that libertarians are the ideological successor to the Segregation movement, but that they are FUCKING TERRIBLE about hiding it! For fuck’s sake, if libertarians gave even one single fuck on actually appearing even vaguely liberal, it would be simplicity itself to condemn an era in American history so universally acknowledged as racist that if all the people who claimed to be on one side or the other actually were, segregation would have been physically impossible. And yet here’s Matt Welch playing mealy mouthed about how… misunderstood those poor gentle beasts were.

brings out the best in activists. See, for example, Martin Luther King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.“

…I…

Okay, I’m having difficulty picking which outraged response, so we’re breaking it up into 3 possible alternative timelines.

Timeline 1: It’s worth noting that that his link doesn’t actually go to MLK’s famous work, but rather a “Reason” article which basically manages to somehow combine shit-talking MLK with straight-up stealing the rhetorical power of his legacy to argue that libertarians are the inheritors to his legacy. Ah, rich white entitled douchebags stealing the hard work of black activists. Will that ever get old? …Please Bob let that get fucking old soon.

That’s how it could have happened. But how about this?

Timeline 2: “brings out the best in activists”…? I suppose it’s the natural conclusion of the douchey form of devil’s advocate (nah, nah, minority group, our constantly shifting bullshit needling of your basic humanity is just us helping you be a better arguer when you encounter real bigots, but the fact that you are occasionally losing your temper would seem to show that your argument couldn’t have been all that accurate in the first place, because naturally that’s how philosophy works) that libertarians tend to specialize in. Really all those bigots MLK and other black civil rights activists at the time faced (also worth noting how much white douchebags try and make a historic movement into one or two people because it’s much easier to exploit or dismiss one person rather than many) were just trying to help out those poor activists and make them a better form of activist capable of producing much more useful texts for future douchebags to steal. Again, I have to point out that even when they are vaguely trying to say MLK was awesome, they’re still doing their best to try and make segregation seem vaguely noble.

But here’s how it actually happened.

Timeline 3: Ignore the other blips in the multiverse. Let’s get right down to the fucking heart of the matter. MLK was beaten, arrested, and finally shot in the fucking head before reaching the age of 40. All for standing up for something a handful of decades ago that we all try and pretend we all supported as a no duh today. To take that risk of standing up for what was right, for the basic humanity of one’s people, often comes with that penalty. And when it isn’t, it often comes with a harder life. Those who go first, those who speak loudest, those who speak most eloquently often paint a giant target on their chest and have to resolve that. It isn’t even remotely right nor just that activists should have to face police harassment, righteous imprisonment, hateful dehumanization, job discrimination, bigoted arguments, cultural hate, familial abandonment, and/or FUCKING MURDER, because of who they be and what they stand for.

Those bigots weren’t trying to “make MLK a better activist” and they didn’t. MLK had the capacity to speak on behalf of his people’s suffering regardless of whether they were suffering and if allowed he could have had a long life separate from having to fight for what we finally recognize as a “no duh”. What those bigots were trying to do was shut him up. Though the terrorism they put him and others through to try and prevent them bringing their voices into the conversation was swift, horrifying and was definitely too much for some to take that risk.

Minority groups shouldn’t have to go through hell, every time, out of some misguided duty to the overprivileged wankers in society who just want a neat aemotional story they can borrow and stitch from later. And the petty bullshit they face doesn’t need to be focused on and given “attention”, because a) it’s not an actual argument, it’s a terrorism tactic designed to make being brave and moving society forward something that is seen as ALWAYS punished and b) it’s already the dominant conversation. No one’s listening to Jason Collins and going “gosh, I wonder if petty bigots are going to be assholes about this”. We know they will and the reason Jason and others have to stand up is because those passive threats against whoever takes that risk are the only thing we ever hear until someone does. I doubt Jason Collins will meet the same end as MLK, but that history for those who are brave exists and colors and breeds fear.

Because that’s the intention. To make minority groups so scared that they dare not call attention to themselves. And to make allies so scared that they dare not publicly support them if they do. Leaving every one of those activists feeling alone and harassed and trying to push through all reasonableness inside of them for the sake of doing the right thing.

Now then, Taintweasel, what else you got?

Jason Collins in his essay from today talked about how former NBA great Tim Hardaway had come around from being a rhetorical gay-basher to a strong supporter of gay rights. The country is changing fast, and while many of us are yelling faster!, it’s important to recognize that a lot of people feel uncomfortable about it all. Better to have that conversation out loud, than let it fester.

Hey, we’re on your side, gay people! We just think that the country is being changed way too fast into one that actually recognizes you as full human beings and allows you full participation in society without constant harassment and we’re thinking that might make the bigots uncomfortable and you know how they get when you drag them out of their comfort zone, HINT HINT. Hey now! We weren’t making any threats or passive-aggressively supporting a system of terrorism and bigotry designed to slow down long delayed civil rights that then uses that discrimination to justify the bigotry, we’re just saying you’re taking a risk being this “fast”.

And we’re just so concerned that this “quickness” might be shutting out all the bigoted backlash that we just don’t feel is being focused on quite enough in this particular exact moment and thus might accidentally give people the wrong idea that you are a human being and coming out and being visibly your community and speaking your story is something right and proper. And we just want to make sure that impulse is curbed before people get dangerous ideas.

But remember, everyone, despite our not-very-high-pitched dog-whistles and our fawning sympathy for segregationists, libertarians are really quite socially liberal and it’s only our ever-present love for liberty that drives us to constantly support parties (and people and movements and laws and…) that hate.

So if we continue the baseball notation for all three strikeouts performed we get… oh… ohhhhhh. Awkward.

Frank Louis, The Latest We’ll Let America be Renewed to is 18th Century:
A new twist to the “three strikes and you’re out” policy: the agenda to make criminals out of law-abiding citizens

Yes.

That is in fact the real title from the article. Just in case there was a tiny little spark of hope left in you that dared to believe that what I was offering today was anything other than the sweaty drippings off Alex Jones’s conspiratorial ball sack.

Now, even then, there might be a small little ball of hope still working in you going “sure it may be crazy, but hey, maybe it is a belated acknowledgment of the way the over-expansion of the prison industrial complex has begun inconveniencing even white middle class members in its abuses” like an injured puppy trying to lick its wounds.

Let me bash that poor puppy’s brains out on the sharp rocks of reality.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Ooh be scared! They’re going to throw you in prison just for owning a gun, being a dick to gay people, or buying a house you can’t afford! Sure, not a single one of those things is even remotely illegal on its own much less in any way equivalent to actual real people who have been sucked up into permanent imprisonment because of bullshit “tough on crimes” laws, but still, we want to borrow their suffering (while acknowledging exactly zero of said suffering) in order to make our myopic whining seem principled!

And in case that stubborn ember of hope hasn’t yet been fully snuffed, it’s worth noting that those reductions of his “strikes” is me being generous.

Now, my dear sex idols, I mean readers (I said readers), let’s continue on now that you have been properly reduced to the cold soulless husks our corporate masters most desire (your employers are more than welcome, and if you have none, I’m ordered to tell you to get a job even though you’ve been desperately trying).

You’ve undoubtedly heard the expression “three strikes and you’re out” before- in baseball of course. But in the legal world as well when it comes to certain 3rd time offences (most felonies). Third offence and you are in the slammer!

The Three-Strikes Law. Possibly one of the worst manifestations of Republican and Democratic battles to “look tough on crime”. Coming from California, home to one of the worst manifestations of the law, where even misdemeanors (and where certain minor crimes could count for multiple “strikes”) could get you 25 to Life, this unbelievably fucked up and racist as shit law has been our state’s fourth greatest modern shame (fifth if you count the entire LA/Orange County region) right behind Prop 13 and Presidents Nixon and Reagan.

About 25% of current California inmates are in jail on bullshit “third strike” convictions, some for little more than a few minor theft or minor drug possession busts. We’ve had 25-to-life sentences over a single slice of pizza, less than a gram of meth, or a handful of children’s videos. And shock of shocks, it turns out that the system, promised to put away “those vile rapists”* once and for all, has mostly been used on non-violent crime or victimless offenders, especially with regards to the mentally ill, racial minorities, and sexual minorities (largely trans* sex workers).

Indeed the shamelessness of system’s abuses and the way it has entrenched prisons by inventing reasons to become more and more overcrowded when violent crime and crime in general has been decreasing statewide has been one of the central evidence for prison abolition work here.

It has been far too late that we’ve even begun unraveling this tragedy from our state laws by finally requiring that the third crime for a “three strikes” actually be yanno, violent or serious, and be something worth throwing someone behind bars for their entire lives over.

And it’s worth noting that these laws are something that conservatives have long campaigned to make the default law of the land, along with national disenfranchisement of prison inmates.

But hey, why bother bringing any of that up? Certainly Frank Louis doesn’t give a flying fuck!

So, what has happened to make this law easy to turn against average, law obeying citizens of this country?

… We passed it in the first place???

For fuck’s sake, Frank, if you just wanted to use some random bit of ephemera in order to set up your “i’m a badass rebel, abandoned by the system” pose, you could have picked something that isn’t currently being abused to all fuck to make the most minor of repeat criminals into career “felons” who have been robbed of any ability to be productive citizens.

Easy, make us all criminals. Watch out, it is coming to a courtroom near you… and sooner that you might think.

If… If it really was just this. Just Frank belatedly freaking out like the wingnuts did once white people’s junk started having to go through the Rapeocancertron 9000 at airports, (You know, shock and surprise that their many successes in stripping away their own rights would actually strip away their own rights) I would already have all the excuse needed to go on an epic rant.

But as we’ll shortly see, he’s not even freaking out about anything that’s fucking illegal yet. He’s having a pre-emptive temper tantrum about his own addle-minded fears of how things he does (besides the meth intake and child abuse) could be considered illegal unless BE SCARED, BE SCARED! And I don’t think that even with that giant gap in time between now and his feared future space society, he’d even consider just… abandoning the fucked up and abusive laws before they can be used against middle-class white “law-abiding” citizens. It’s like that parody of the henchmen death scenes in Austin Powers where the guy halfway across the room can’t dodge out of the way of the slow-moving steamroller. But infinitely more depressing and dated.

Strike One: so you bought a house in 2005 or so. Because you didn’t believe in the NINJA Loans, you put your life savings into it as the down payment.

Your entire life savings as just the down payment on a home? Unless you get a reasonable mortgage or are one of the majority of Americans whose life savings are for utter shit, that is a pretty financially bad decision right there. And I mean, it’s also worth noting that it wasn’t exactly the “liberal” side of the equation that was feeding that whole bubble in the first place. Not to mention-

Wait. NINJA Loans?!? Why would you ever turn those down?!? I would steal your house to secure one of those!

Now you’re trying to retire and the house is worth less than you owe.

Sorry, I know that there have been a number of legitimate tragedies caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. And it’s worth noting that perennial wingnut-punching-bags Occupy Wall Street have been one of the few organizations actually working to alleviate the fallout from those.

But I also grew up in Suburban Hell during the growth of the Housing Bubble and met the exact type of douchebag that Frank wants to view as the only possible victim. The fuckers who gleefully propagated the Housing Bubble by treating fucking HOUSES as “safe investment opportunities” that would only “go up in price” and got burned with all the people they fucked over when the scam collapsed on them.

Yeah, turns out treating a house like a fucking “retirement portfolio” while far too many go without basic shelter was a dumb fucking idea (oh hey, something else Occupy is trying to alleviate). But of course the same reasons I have difficulty mustering sympathy for those particular douchebag “speculators” is exactly the same reason that assholes like Frank view them as the only sympathetic victims of the crisis.

No problem, don’t retire… ever (if you have that option), work till you die.

And we’re supposed to pretend that this hasn’t been the conservative “solution” to the retirement problem for a long fucking time, because…? For fuck’s sake, they’ve been hard-selling privatizing social security for nearly a decade now simply because it’s one of the few pools of money that isn’t currently in their rigged casinos. But I guess, this is somehow our fault now, because reasons.

Also, not to belabor a minor point, but… where the fuck is even the approximation of a crime in this? Oh no, you bought a house you can’t afford and are forced to accept foreclosure and bankruptcy. It’s fucking tragic and financially crippling (not going to argue otherwise), but it’s not like we’ve got debtor’s prisons any more (though the right has certainly been hard at work trying to bring them back).

Either way, your financial life is destroyed. Foreclosure, perhaps bankruptcy awaits you as you approach your golden years.

Ah, there’s the belated acknowledgment of all that. I was wondering if he would even bother.

A big judgment is wht awaits you in my crystal ball.

…?

The fuck does that mean?!?

Typo aside, how does this even begin to relate to the subject at hand? It’s like he knew ahead of time that his second two “strikes” were even dumber, and wanted something vaguely sympathetic to blunt criticism but forgot to even bother connecting it to the framing topic.

I mean, let’s try and follow the logic. I guess, being financially ruined in the Brave New World “might as well be a crime” in the eyes of conservatives, but… Actually, given that conservatives view being poor as a crime in and of itself, I probably shouldn’t have been that surprised by this ending.

Strike Two: So you believe in the Bible. You think that it is wrong to be gay, immoral even. Even more so, you are morally opposed to gay marriage. You want to continue teaching your children and grandchildren (great grand children too???) the same traditional Christian values you grew up with.

Speaking of stupidity, we get this bit of self-victimization pablum. Oh noes! Being anti-gay is no longer the majority opinion of the nation and now majority-appeasing moderates aren’t as willing to stand in solidarity with you as you continue to champion an increasingly unpopular position you only hold because your religious leaders thought it would be good for their pew numbers a couple of decades ago. Truly no one else has ever felt such cruel and violent oppression.

Sure, there isn’t yet national protections for all queer people to be employed and secure shelter and even in locales with said protections, perceptions of “visible queerness” are still used to discriminate in hiring, internal promotion, and continued employment, but hey, I’m sure the fact that people might look at you askance when you rant about how you’re going to teach your great grand children how to hate them faggots from your nursing home bed is much more emotionally draining than having your humanity devalued to the point where your employer is willing to drive you to suicide over risking being sued over their patently illegal behavior.

Bitter? Moi? How could you suggest such a thing? I have only the deepest sympathies for what Fuckwad Frank is going through. In fact, the way the er… things are now illegal… er… Actually, sorry, which track were you trying to divert this Fail Train to again?

The ones that are now considered “hate speech.”

Holy fuck, Canada took us over and no one told me?!? I’m sorry everyone, but I need to run out right now and secure me some of that actually functional health care system. The automatic post software can take over until I get back.

Initializing

(Curse word) (Patronizing use of writer’s first name), (Overly-descriptive description of feces) (Big word) (Overused joke) (Elipses) HURGAGURDA *Smoke*

And I’m back**. Turns out that we don’t actually have Canadian Overlords, so this is either about some nightmarish future where Canuckistan conquers us with mad curling skills or it’s yet another example of conservatives using another country’s sensible laws to try and claim oppression in a country where we won’t even press charges if you engineer a genocide in another country, much less if you create a climate where huge amounts of a minority class are driven to suicide or murdered in hate crimes because of what you “preach” as “religion”.

Tough choice, but I think I’m going to go with the dystopia where we’re all ruled over by a goalie-masked Wayne Gretsky. It’s more sci-fi!

Say you own a bed and breakfast or small inn, perhaps you are a wedding photographer or maybe a baker.

See, you can tell that the Christianist fucks are the real oppressed group in all of this, because they keep turning to the same 4 or 5 “examples” of their oppression which were all bigots who were not allowed to use public funds to selectively practice their bigotry any more, but were in no other way stopped from being complete and utter dicks.

I mean, if they were faking it, they’d probably like invent a day out of the year where you just list all the people in your community who have been horrifically murdered for being who they are or something suspicious like that.

And not to belabor the point, but again, it seems like you were so eager to jump into the Lion’s Den and show off your Daniel skills, that you seem to have forgotten to even pretend to connect it to your half-arsed premise. So again, how the fuck is this illegal or soon to be illegal again?

You can’t refuse to celebrate this event, despite your religious convictions. Go ahead, turn the business down.

Yes, truly in the Obama Marxist gulags of the future, everyone will be forced to attend gay weddings and if they don’t look suitably cheerful or, GOD FORBID, reject a sexual advance from the Best Person (Political Correctness Oder Tod!), they are instantly ignited with glitter bombs. Such is THE LAW!

There are already people being prosecuted for this very thing in this country and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

And tonight in “Things That Never Happened Outside the Fevered Imaginations of Conservatives” we talk to a Hippo who has learned the secret of flight (apparently you just throw yourself at the ground and miss [Ha! Pre-emptive Douglas Adams reference]).

Just wait until you are told you are “unfit” and are court ordered to stay from your own family because of the “hate” you spew quoting those nasty scriptures.

Sigh… Why do conservatives have to keep taunting us with images of a MUCH better world with their fearful delusions?

Imagine if people trying desperately to train the next generation to hate were actually blocked from passing on those prejudices. If those future queers growing up in ultra-religious communities didn’t have to ride through a gauntlet of learned internalized shame and could just be themselves from a young age. And if those employers didn’t feel it was “their place” to enforce their “moral values” in the workplaces they run so that people could deal with the stress of a major life change without people kicking them while they’re down***. If religious child abuse was treated as it was rather than treated as the only untouchable right outside the right to arm yourself with a small nation’s entire arsenal.

Sigh…

Recently, the hit TV show, “The Bible” was aired.

I’m sorry. I seem to have gotten a bit of a case of whiplash from you switching topics on me without a fucking clutch. Praytell, dear rambling madman, how does this bit of Nielsen trivia relate to any fucking thing you’ve been talking about so far?

I don’t know if you noticed or not but the program started each week with the title “The Bible” followed wirh a statement that read “not yet rated.” Wow, did that catch my eye. When is it going to be rated “R” for violence and hate speech or receive the ESRB Rating of “A” for adults only content? Just wait. Don’t you even think about sharing it with the children. No the president has spoken. He has a way with subtleties in wordings. He has said we have the right to “worship” however we want. He didn’t say we could practice our religious convictions. “Worship” in your church or synagogue or temple (even your mosque) just keep your beliefs to yourself.

…

I think my brain just broke a little bit trying to follow the bouncing ball down the Mountains of Madness. So… a show entirely based in throwing away the reputation of one of the few channels left on television that used to deal at least slightly with reality in order to give you the sloppiest blowjob imaginable and which is kind enough to literally depict Obama as the devil for you is… equal to you being Christian being made illegal because… There isn’t a rating on it (and let’s not even get into the irony of you whining about the complete impossibility of it being rated adults only (as if that would at all effect anything because it’s a fucking TV show on cable) considering that fuckwad Christian pastors are responsible for rating any movie that shows a woman enjoying sex or even the tamest same-sex relationship as adults only)… and that means that somehow blocks you from showing it to kids… on the TV that is in your home and which has no real gatekeepers preventing you from showing it to your kids… Also, apparently Obama is directly responsible for Television content rating systems, because that’s totally a job handled at the top level of the Executive Branch and not at all a task given to the lowest rung in the FCC hierarchy… But hey, it’s probably because he’s the Antichrist anyways (I mean, seriously, have you seen that documentary on the History channel where the Devil looks exactly like him?!?) and sends secret messages that only deranged wanna-be martyrs can see… Also, freedom of religion exists, but doesn’t exist, but only exists in one’s religious services… except that it’s not and even if it was that would somehow be the same as not having religious freedom at all and-

Why does everything smell like copper all of a sudden?

Much being said today about historic events in professional sports. Any Christians going to come out of the closet?

Oh. Suddenly it makes sense. He’s suffering from Oppression Envy and wants to play-act like his dominant oppressive group is equivalent to the minorities whose lives they actively work to make worse because there’s whole picoseconds being given to something other than the lives of rich-to-upper-middle-class white Christian heterosexual males.

And somehow this is worse than actual oppression or actual imprisonment, but not at all because he’s an overprivileged wanker whose never had a real problem in his life, oh no!

And yeah, about those historic events… It might be because they are yanno, historic and occurring in sports where an assumption of heteronormativity has been enforced with brutal bullying, active discrimination, and a dudebro culture that desperately tries and equate the sports with a type of toxic masculinity that looks upon queerness as feminization.

And if Christians were not represented in something, but then were, you bet your ass it would be a news story as well. Like when an all muslim Egyptian National Football squad for the London Olympics was coached by a Coptic Christian, but hey, let’s not let reality get in the way of a good hard pout.

Show me one thread of scientific evidence that in anyway establishes that there is a gay gene… a gay anything. You can’t.

(Evil grin)

I believe any of the 99 links gathered here will satisfy nicely.

And yeah, I think it’s safe to say at this point, he’s completely forgotten what he was trying to argue.

But my free speech and freedom of religion as guaranteed under the constitution have just been tossed down the toilet dare I state this fact!

Which is why you weren’t able to write that complete bit of scientific inaccuracy on the blog you are paid to write for, nor talk about these issues regularly on the weekly radio show you are probably paid more than I’ll ever make to host. By saying this, you are guaranteeing that you will be thrown in a gulag, your picture ripped out of your family photo albums and burned, while former friends three times deny your name.

Truly a horrifying outcome. Even I, discriminated against for simply being who I am and asking direct permission before undergoing anything, see your plight and weep at the injustice exhibited. I will devote all my waking hours to your court case, brother. Solidarity!

Strike Three: So you own a gun or believe in the 2nd amendment.

So you gunned down an entire classroom full of kindergartners… Oh wait, no that would be related to something that would ever have a remote chance of actually being illegal. It’s just the usual “Obama gun’ grab your guns” free marketing for the firearm manufacturing companies.

I guess if all you have to go on is the tired phantoms in your head, you might as well have them trot the circle like all the other doggies.

Going to surrender them? Register them at the $100 each many “lawmakers” are discussing? This is not going away folks.

That is correct.

Tired conspiracy theories regarding even the most threadbare attempts at common sense gun control legislation are never. EVER. going away.

A sadly true statement.

Why aren’t the thousands of gun laws already on the books getting enforced?

Because the NRA works tirelessly to defang the legislation where possible and ensure that easily exploitable loopholes remain open enough to drive a truck through? Because Republicans try and underfund the ATF to the point of starvation because of decades of selling conspiracy theory bullshit to the rubes? Because the right-wing reflexively embraces as hero anyone, and I mean anyone, who violates existing law to stock illegal firearms (see the continued deification of Waco)?

I dunno, fuckstick. Take your pick.

I will tell you, because none of the existing laws accomplish what this new legislation is going to accomplish: Make everyday citizens into criminals.

That is certainly a… pick.

Yes, not enforcing laws… =… being a citizen is now a felony.

Yeah, that’s how… that… works. Yup. It’s not like with the actual three-strikes law whose legacy you’re offensively borrowing for your conspiracy theory pity party, the way it’s actually works is by over-enforcing bad laws like maximum sentence seeking on petty thefts, victimless drug charges, or Vice harassment busts of sex workers. Nope, it’s all not enforcing laws on the books or that aren’t even remotely close to being on the books or are actively banned by the constitution from being on the books. This somehow spells the actual oppression that will throw all the conservatives into the Obama Death Camps before they can discover the Weally Weally Twue Kenyan Birth Certificate.

Three Strikes… You’re Out!

Folks, you keep electing and reelecting thee people. Not me.

Yes, the elusive “they” is electing the people continuing to argue for the expansion of abusive “tough on crime” laws that ill serve the public, the people who propped up the Housing Bubble and caused the Global Financial Collapse, the people who abuse religious freedom laws in order to dictate a “correct way of living” that is punished by discrimination and dehumanization, the people who are preventing gun laws from being enforced…

Hmm, sorry there’s something on your forehead. It looks like it’s a blinking IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION sign.

In fact, fuck the projection and the whiny “I wish I was an oppressed minority so I could be in the moral right” martyr envy. Let’s look at what possible combination of these could lead someone to actually fear running afoul of the Three Strikes Law.

Strike One: Let’s leave aside obvious candidates like stealing your house while not actually being a financial institution or living in a home wherein someone you sublet to once smoked a little pot and didn’t take the bag with them when they left and instead nominate being dinged for “illegal squatting” in your home once you discovered that the bank trying to foreclose on you doesn’t actually have the mortgage they are claiming you forfeited on (by refusing to accept payment or renegotiation on it in order to justify foreclosing).

Strike Two: Well, seeing as how even actively arguing for the violent murder of queers and open discrimination is protected criminally in these United States, there’s really only one way this becomes a strike and it’s a way that’s going to fuck you even with the recent change to the law. And it’s assault, murder, or some other violent crime undertaken to “enforce morality”. Sorry, buddy, but even if you claim that God commanded you to do it, actual hate crimes are still actual hate crimes.

Strike Three: As much as I’d like to include terminal stupidity on the list of felonies and misdemeanors that could apply, the misinterpretation of the 2nd amendment (it’s pretty clearly about actual militias, I.E. the creation of the national guard and yet you fuckers keep arguing it’s clearly about letting every Tom, Dick, and Harry own his own penis-extending arsenal) still remains the most overprotected “right” in the Bill of Rights. Thus like the last one, the only way this ends up applying is if you decide to use your arsenal to strike down the “feminizing agents in our society”.

So yeah, if you really were “law-abidingly” violating these strikes, you would single-handedly be the most deserving person to ever be tried under the Three-Strikes Law and no amount of having a “law-abiding” skin tone and bank balance could possibly save you.

*Yeah, no cookies for guessing if California’s rape conviction rate is dramatically better than any other states or if the percentage of rapists dinged by a three strikes law is at all comparable to what was used to sell the Amendment in the first place. Also, no cookies for guessing if rape in California prisons is a less omnipresent issue than in other state penitentiaries. But hey, it helped build a fuckton more prisons and incarcerate a fuckton of black people, so let’s count it as a win anyways, shall we?

**Like I was never gone at all.

***If you want to ask, let’s just say it’s all going poorly and leave it at that for now.

Apparently conservatives have gotten all their information on how civil prisons work from 80s cartoon villains.

Jan LaRue (not to be confused with LaRouche), American Bloodsport:
Tsarnaev the Fraud

Sigh…

When I first heard about the terrible bombings at the Boston Marathon, I was in the middle of writing a post on some storm in a tea-kettle thing wherein the only objectionable thing seemed to be the only thing no one wanted to talk about in any real depth.

Which admittedly, after the attack, felt a bit cold and hallow. And it didn’t feel right writing about frivolous matters when something so big was in the radar.

At the same time, it was difficult to write about the bombings themselves, because there was little to no real information. I mean sure, there were enough early responses from wingnuts that deserved a good kicking. This piece of work was impressively bad in terms of reflexive “anyone who suspects us just because we have done the last 12 attacks and tend to blow shit up around Tax Day is a vile commie rat” is impressively bad.

But empathy and good judgment demanded waiting until the facts come out.

And the facts are that the bombers, motive yet to be fully determined, turned out to be foreigny, Russian-adjacent, immigrant, muslim types. And my heart just sank straight to the ground. Not just for those victims of the bombings who had their days and some their lives ruined for such ill-defined bullshit reasons. Not just for the immigrant or muslim communities who do not need another hot-head asshole blowing shit up when the dominant population has treated them so terribly for so long after every time something like this happens. But also, sad to say, for the quality of right-wing noise we’re sure to be drowning in for the next couple of months/years.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, the right-wingers have already been desperate for something, anything to distract from incidents like Sandy Hook or how the vast majority of terrorist attacks in America come from white conservatives punching down on minority groups (especially women and/or queers) or perceived enemies (such as the government) and this is like fucking Christmas for them. The only thing that would make them perversely happier would be if the killers were also a queer female-identified feminist couple who worked as personal abortion doctors for Obama’s secret Kenyan family.

So, rejoice and repent Sadly Noians, because this is going to be the caliber of articles we’re going to be inundated with for a long long while.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Wait. An immigrant muslim committed this attack? Well, dust off the trucks to Arkham and revoke that citizenship. Because what’s the point of having illegal prison camps and a complete revoking of basic human rights unless it can be the default fate for anyone muslimy who commits an act of terrorist violence.

Unwritten but nonetheless accurate follow-up: “What’s that, you say? Should the same fate befall white people who commit terrorist acts? Kssh. Sorry, can’t hear you. Kssh. Going through a tunnel. Oh, and by the way, those people are obviously heroes being persecuted by the liberal media and shouldn’t even be so much as investigated.”

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be tried by a military commission at Guantanamo Bay rather than in U.S. federal court on charges related to the Boston Marathon bombing. Naturalized American citizenship obtained by fraud is revocable.

As I noted in the shorter, it’s just straight up reflexive at this point. What? He’s mulsimy? Find an excuse to throw him in Arkham… I mean Guantanamo.

I mean, yes, I get that the torture and abuse, and the never having a chance to ever leave and having an excuse to abuse innocent people who happen to share a religion is the point of this reflex, but do they ever realize how batshit this sounds to someone with a conscience?

For fuck’s sake, Tsarnaev was caught on film carrying one of the backpacks used in the explosion, was involved in several murders and major felonies while trying to avoid capture, was identified by one of the bombing victims, and has pretty much fessed up to committing the crime while in custody. He’s going to prison. For the rest of his life. There’s no fucking reason to hide from due process like you’re scared he’s going to use his heat rays to melt the judge presiding and then bust out of the Court using his latent telekinetic abilities. If this was any more open and shut, it’d be the literal book that the Federal Government will be throwing at him.

There is Supreme Court precedent for revoking naturalized citizenship based on swearing a false oath of allegiance. See Knauer v. United States (1946); Perez v. Brownell (“Of course, naturalization unlawfully procured can be set aside.”); and Fedorenko v. United States.

Moreover, during WWII, a German soldier who claimed naturalized U.S. citizenship but had gone back to Germany changed into civilian clothes after landing on U.S. soil from a German submarine with the intent of engaging in espionage and sabotage. The Supreme Court held in Ex Parte Quirin, that his claim of American citizenship and the right to trial in civil court was irrelevant to his confinement in a military brig as an unlawful belligerent in violation of the rules of war.

Back in the day, The New York Times opined that a military tribunal was the fitting venue for the Americans charged with conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. And so they were.

Because we revoked due process in questionable circumstances in the past involving public freakouts and concurrent or recently ended brutal wars, we must always repeat those lapses into the future. Because what’s the point of a democracy if we can’t just straight up suspend the rule of law and institute kangaroo courts every time we’re the slightest bit scared that an open-and-shut case won’t go our way.

Because that’s a great long-term strategy that has never been abused- oh, wait!

So far, the Obama administration hasn’t announced when or where charges will be filed. The odds are that it will be a prolonged and costly civil trial in federal court with threats and disruptions to the city where a civil trial is held.

I wonder… what will be the costs of our indefinite illegal prison in Cuba over the next infinity and a half years? Especially if we decide to tacitly make it our “anybody muslim” prison. Or how much the civil suits for basic upholding of civil rights, international suits for failure to abide by war crime protocol? Or the damage in material benefits caused by our lowered status because of such terrible practices of regularly revoking the rule of law for reasons of being brown?

Cause somehow I think it outweighs one fucking open-and-shut trial that will last a week at best and the slightly increased security just in case the zero of fuckwads that stood behind these assholes decides to… do something… I guess?

But hey, since we’re on the topic of law and wasted money, I’m glad you’re worried about it too, because I’ve been noticing how much government money we are wasting finding any and all excuses to throw brown people in prison for huge prison sentences for victimless crimes like drug possession, made-up bullshit, or minor misdemeanors like stealing $20 worth of diapers adding up under things like the Three Strikes Law. Maybe we can finally bridge the gap and work, both right and left together on reducing our financial waste on- Oh, what’s that? You’re going through another tunnel? Fan-fucking-tastic.

Seven months after becoming a U.S. citizen on Sept. 11, 2012, Tsarnaev faces charges of committing terrorist acts against “his” country, in addition to murder, mayhem, and numerous other felonies.

Yes, like any number of right-wing terrorist we’ve encountered in the last two decades. Fuckers like Eric Rudolph, David Koresh, and Timothy McVeigh all committed terrorist acts against their country. Any number of fucks have committed terrorist acts against certain members of their country and many in addition to murder, abuse, torture, rape, and other felonies. But the main difference between them and Tsarnaev in the eyes of the right-wing is that those terrorists were white and Christian.

Are we to believe that it was after swearing his oath of “true faith and allegiance to the United States of America” not one year ago, that “Dzhokhar the Innocent” was brainwashed and provoked by his older brother, Tamerlan, into murdering, maiming and terrorizing fellow Americans?

We don’t know what the fuck Dzokhar’s motive was in this whole thing and why he helped his brother out yet. It’s one of the big reasons it’s taken so long to get any definite reasons or information about the attack in general. I imagine it will come out hopefully soon as the feds continue to interrogate him.

Hey, you know what would force him to provide his rationale for the attack and help shed some light on his involvement? Putting him through a trial for his crimes and seeing what his defense is.

More likely, the bombing was planned prior to Tsarnaev becoming a “citizen.” He sought the privileges of citizenship to have an advantage in the event that he was captured and prosecuted.

Yes, he was clearly planning this bombing for years. That’s why there was so much information about their plans in their home and why law enforcement was already tipped off about a possible bombing attempt involving Boston long before the incident, but it just slipped through the cracks…

Or it was a more spur of the moment thing based on who knows what and maybe we should take advantage of the rule of law in order to find out more information about what our black box of a bomber thought he was doing and why.

… Oh wait, silly me. You just want to feed into arguments that immigrants should be treated as suspicious until proven otherwise in the same way that last paragraph you were trying to insinuate that there’s some massive pro-Tsarnaev community making excuses for him by expecting the rule of law to play itself out in order to demonize anyone who thinks that the other Amendments besides the 2nd one are kinda important too.

On that note, I notice you laying the defenses early in case it turns out that one of the triggering factors in Tsarnaev’s attack was the way immigrants are treated like enemy combatants waiting to happen. Stay classy there, Janet.

Both Mother Jones.com and Forbes.com report that Tsarnaev maintained the Twitter account identified as “J_star.” Consider his anti-American tweets prior to taking the oath of citizenship:

I wonder… How cold would the modern age have been for conservatives without Twitter? It’s like it’s personally made for modern conservatism. From the tight character limit that makes it difficult to do anything other than recite talking points to the way it makes complex dialogue nearly impossible to the way it makes it easy to sic your followers on other users you hate to the way it allows you to grab random bad seeming snippets whose context is almost impossible to discern, it’s like their horrifying horrifying wet dream come true.

Just seven months before becoming naturalized Jahar @J_tsar posted on March 14, 2012, “a decade in America and I want out.” There aren’t any posts indicating a change of heart.

Seven months before becoming naturalized, he had already spent a decade in America. So it took over ten years for him to finally finish jumping through the hoops and he did so as one of the lucky ones coming from a European country.

Yeah, I don’t see how that hellish and dehumanizing process could at all have led him to growing bitter and angry about the whole ordeal.

Fuck, I’ve lived here my whole damn life and I want fucking out of our broken fucking system and the way it chews anyone different up and spits them back out. It doesn’t mean I’m going to start blowing up shit.

And before we continue, you know what’s especially sad about this example? That it’s completely unnecessary. Most non-crazy right-wingers are pretty much on board with “yup, he certainly is a terrorist fuck”. It’s not like everyone’s nervously on the fence waiting for someone to go “but wait! There’s a single slightly bitter tweet from a long time ago that anyone in a depressed state could have written.” to break out the torches and pitchforks.

But I guess, it wouldn’t be a right-wing post without them tripping over their own arguments and trying to present their case in the most counter-intuitive straight-up wrong way they could.

Ten days before swearing his “allegiance” to the U.S., Jahar @J_tsar tweeted on Sept. 1, 2012 came out as a “truther”: “Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job, I mean I guess [f***] the facts y’all are some real #patriots #gethip.

So was Alex Jones, but I didn’t see you blanching away from him when he was helping your fellow fuckheads at American Birther sell Obama birth certificate conspiracy theories.

Do you have anything fucking real to say?

Seven months after swearing allegiance to the United States, Tsarnaev lies in a Boston hospital with bullet holes from a gunfight with police who pulled him from a boat in a backyard where he was hiding. Eyewitnesses and videotapes link his cowardly terrorist acts from the bullets on Friday to the bombs in Boston on Monday.

Thank you.

Wow, that’s actually rather good. Accurate facts, no rambling shortcut to conspiracy or tweet-picking lane. In fact, it’s so reasonable that I’m left wondering when the next shoe will dr-

As usual, we’re hearing the liberal victimization meme that 19-year-old Tsarnaev, who drove a car over his brother, is just a regular American kid led astray while grieving over injustice in his homeland of Chechnya, and should be afforded all of the rights of citizenship.

And there it is.

Okay, Jan, who?

Who is trading this “victimization meme” about Tsarnaev. Who is arguing that he’s some innocent victim of the system who surely couldn’t be held responsible for the bombing?

What’s that, you say? No one, is it?

Oh wait, you’re just trying to argue that anyone that says American citizens are afforded the same Constitutional rights as any other American citizen is arguing for Tsarnaev to go free. Because you’re a cowardly shit who can’t even bother to stand behind a “I want to live in a dictatorship that brutally oppresses minority groups I don’t like under a different set of laws than that given dominant group members” argument even when they are making it.

Yeah, Tsarnaev gets his constitutional right to appear in court, just like the many and varied right-wing terrorists, vile mass-shooters, and serial killers we’ve tried through courts without incident. We didn’t fret about Charles Manson getting his due process. Nor about Scott Roeder. Fuck, the only people we’ve had recently arguing that being an American citizen meant not having to suffer the indignity of going to court and trying to prove your innocence were the fucks trying to defend George Zimmerman.

But slap on a connection to conservative Islamic fuckwittery and suddenly it’s a national freakout.

Oh, and on a side-note, if you have so little faith in the American Justice system that you expect a high-profile murderer involved in an open-and-shut terrorist attack to walk from a court tried in the city he tried to terrorize, then buddy, we need to fucking scrap what we call an American Justice System because it’s so broken we might as well start from fucking scratch.

Tsarnaev should be confined and interrogated in Gitmo as an illegal enemy combatant. His confinement should be defended against a writ of habeas corpus on that basis along with a complaint to revoke his fraudulent citizenship.

Rend the meat from his bones. Seed his homeland’s farms with salt. Flood the Earth and set fire to the sky. Make of him an example that no human shall ever survive. Only in this way shall we be protected from the vengeful terrorism Gods.

Jan LaRue is a Senior Legal Analyst for the American Civil Rights Union.

ACRU… ACLU… I see what you did there.

Well, I’m shocked, shocked to discover that greater Wingnutistan has latched on to the Boston bombings as an opportunity to find their favorite liberal bogeymen hiding behind the explosions. Who would have thought?

Of course, you don’t have to be the fastest shooting wingnut in the butthurt corral to point your fingers at immigrants and immigration and all that. Hell, they were going to do that even if the bombers’ parents had immigrated to the United States on the May-fucking-flower itself. I mean, even if the perpetrators were whiter than Tagg Romney, then that just goes to prove that swarthy Middle Easterners are bound to be even worse if we let them in. I mean, if a real American could do that just imagine what a devil-worshiping foreigner would be able to do!

Of course, you can always count on America’s Shittiest Website™ to take any normal right-wing talking point and give it that special little twist, that slight whiff of eliminationism, that makes them so special. Let’s see that in action by paying a little visit to Stanley Kurtz, shown above in his profile picture on ChristianMingle.com. Stanley isn’t just worried about keeping the foreigners and immigrants out in the wake of the bombings. No, the bombings have him all worried about the ones that are already here and who pose an existential threat to the American way of life because they speak multiple languages fluently, because they like soccer more than baseball, because they dress funny and because they listen to scary music with funny instruments and weird ululations that sound like, at least to patriotic ears, cattle fucking in a crowded parking lot.

Thanks to the rise of multiculturalism and bilingualism in the United States, our assimilation system now suffers from the same flaws as its European counterpart. The proposed immigration bill does little to fix this, and if anything aggravates an already critical situation. Without fixing our system of patriotic assimilation first …, a path to citizenship will surely do more harm than good.

(And you thought I was joking about Stanley being afraid of people who spoke more than one language!)

Not surprisingly, Stanley isn’t letting us in on his secret plan to assimilate all the furinners already here, although I suspect it goes beyond doling out jail sentences for people speaking anything other than English in public. Probably he’s got in mind reeducation camps where Muslims and Buddhists are forced to watch “Leave It To Beaver,” “Father Knows Best,” and the “700 Club.”

The number of immigrants who might someday turn into terrorists is small. Yet it only takes a few to cause trouble.

You know, the number of right-wing evangelicals who might someday bomb abortion clinics or gay bars is also quite small, but, as Stanley says, it only takes a few to cause trouble. Perhaps right-wing evangelicals need to be assimilated better as well although, oddly, Stanley doesn’t seem to advocate that. I do think, however, that re-education and assimilation camps where right-wing evangelicals are required to watch “The New Normal,” to go to the gym, to eat sushi and to learn how to make a bone-dry martini might be way more fun! What do you think?

Larry Klayman: I blame Obama for letting the terrorists blow up that fertilizer plant in Texas.

Judie Brown: I blame text messaging and iPads for euthanasia.

Chris Adamo: I blame the left for the Boston Marathon bombings.

Lloyd Marcus: I blame the media for not pointing out that the Boston bombings were probably the work of left-wing extremists.

Tabitha Korol: I blame the Irish Teacher’s Union for turning St. Patrick into a Muslim.

Fuck the photoshop. I want this image forever linked to Robert Johnson’s lame attempts at post hoc rationalization.

Robert Johnson, Business Insider Humanity Outsider:
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GITMO STRIKE: Detainees Are Treated Absurdly Well

…

We go on and on here about the sad truism that is “IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION” here at Sadly, No! Because unfortunately IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION with so many right-wing arguments, freak-outs, and accusations thrown out at liberals. And that sad reality is rarely ever more true when it comes to the conservative fetish object of “Personal Responsibility”. “Personal Responsibility” is the conservative one stop response to pretty much any and all discrimination and bigotry in the world.

Oh, are you poor and starving on the streets because rich people are hogging all the money and have actively opposed the notion of social safety nets? Welp, should have had some “Personal Responsibility” and magicked up a high paying job from your colon. Oh, are you queer and being harassed for it? Welp, maybe you should have thought about “Personal Responsibility” before you started shoving your differences in people’s faces. Oh, are you a woman and you’ve been raped? Welp, you definitely should have shown some “Personal Responsibility” before going to a place that contained at least one rapist while living in a rape culture that actively and passively condones it… I mean, something about short skirts and being a whore, I dunno.

And for all they love the word (and only the word) when they are trying to dodge their way out of empathy or actually having to pretend that the suffering and deaths of “undesirables” isn’t the fucking point, there is nothing they actually hate accepting more in substance.

Conservatives hate taking actual personal responsibility for their successes. Every kid gunned down by their proud successes in making the 2nd Amendment such a third rail that no one dares even pass obvious gun control measures. Every back-alley abortion chop shop that’s allowed to endure and crop up because the conservatives have been blowing up and murdering real abortion doctors by the handfuls. Every economy tanked into the toilet because of their fetishistic love of how libertarian reforms make the rich richer. Every massive disaster made worse because poor responses to Anthropic Climate Change have had dire consequences to world weather patterns.

They hate getting the credit for these deliberate successes and constantly try and throw the blame on anyone else they can or just try and deny the consequences of their policy away.

And that has never been more true than the hesitancy in which conservatives approach their eternal monument to their greatest successes. That being our permanent illegal prison in Guantanamo Bay. Not only did we kidnap any Ahmed, Bettina, and Muhammad we could roust off the streets and accuse of a crime, ripping them away from their families and disappearing them for years and then ritually torturing them with no promise of release. But we then turned them into a public badge of our war crimes, practically daring foreign nations to try and call us out on our shit as we straight up took their citizens as well into our hell hole. And then once the smoke had cleared and we all realized that there was no way in Hell we’d be able to keep these people legally and it was time to fess up and release our prisoners. Conservatives got another bright idea and decided it wanted to burn liberals for “releasing terrorists” if they followed the law, thus ending up with a situation where we all have a not-so-secret secret prison filled with illegal detainees in a permanent torture camp that will never be closed because Congress is too frightened of bad press from bad-faith conservative assholes to do the right thing.

And so conservatives, thanks to all these successes, are left with a permanent monument to how far America has fallen in public regard and why it has deserved to do so and whose fault that squarely is.

So, left with no other choice other than to admit their fuckups and let go of some pressure to ensure their mistakes are cleaned up with only a minimum of painful fallout, conservatives turn to one of their only two responses to the rewards of their policy decisions:

1) Blaming liberals for it

or

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• 2) Do I really even need to say it? It was the verbatim in his fucking POST TITLE for fuck’s sake. Sigh. All right: Ignore your lying eyes, Gitmo detainees are treated absurdly well in their illegal permanent imprisonment where they are kept on mere suspicion of crimes that the American government knows it cannot win a real criminal case on (because of all the torture) because of an absurd assumption that muslimy people are comic-book supervillains like Doctor Doom.

Which yeah, let’s go back to that post title for a second. They’re not just being treated “well” or “surprisingly well” or even “better than you’d expect”. Nope, they’re being treated “absurdly well”. I mean, it’s absurd how kindly we are treating our permanent disappeared uncitizens, ripped away from their families, regularly tortured, many of whom lacking any official “charge” before receiving this permanent life sentence imprisoned by idiots too weak to actually stand up for what’s right. Fuck, I know if I was to be disappeared in the middle of the night, I would want to end up in the lovely bootheels of American masters than in the state prisons of any of those dictators we are obviously better than.

It’s such a lovely euphemism for what they actually mean. That they are being treated “absurdly well” because in the conservative mind, the only “just” way to treat anyone who is guilty of being suspiciously muslim is to shoot them in the back of the head in front of their weeping families after nuking all their neighbors and friends. And by lovely I mean disturbing.

And on that cheerful note, let’s go on a dainty stroll for the many varied tropical fruits that await.

The latest Guantanamo Bay hunger strike is working as planned.

Insidious hunger strikers! Like that evil vile Gandhi fellow! Cruelly suffering unto themselves in direct assault to their righteous overlords! What a cruel and underhanded trick!

…And you know what the saddest part is? Pretty much every mouthpiece for a brutal oppressive power ever referring to a prisoner of said oppressive power engaging in a hunger strike actually really does condemn their prisoners in exactly the same way including Gandhi. Lots of treatment of self-destruction as a sinister attack, accusing it of being a media stunt, of working to increase terrorist violence against the oppressive power, etc… Every last one including Gandhi himself.

With 31 of 166 detainees acknowledged as hunger strikers, international media reports are hailing this as a desperate protest by mistreated men.

I mean, honestly, desperate? Why the hell would those liberal socialist commie, American-hating bastard liars ever see the detainees as desperate and mistreated? The only explanation is international anti-American sentiments and-

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interviewed public defender Carlos Warner, who claims that his clients face “dire” conditions ever since a new commander took over Guantanamo and the White House abandoned plans to close the detention center.

Oh… right… that.

Well… uh… er… you’re the poopyhead!

I mean, it’s not like being literally abandoned by your oppressors in a hellish illegal camp might dishearten victims who have lost all hopes to see their families again because their jailers are too cowardly to even fully acknowledge their existence.

Or that your bosses literally turning a blind eye to your permanent torture camp might give the green light to all sorts of abusive and authoritarian behavior on behalf of jail commanders. Especially if they are stuck in a dead-end assignment that none of your superiors will ever acknowledge fully and you’re awash in cultural messages that no one will give a fuck what you do to these unpeople who are probably all terrorists directly responsible for 9/11 anyways.

I mean, that’s like… madness… or… something… I’ll stop talking now.

Military spokesman Navy Capt. Robert Durand tells a different story, however, maintaining that the strike is an “orchestrated event intended to garner media attention,” according to the New York Times.

Oh, if only dear readers, if only.

Yes, we’re going to “he said”/”she said” with the oppressive authority itself. Because abusive authorities never ever lie about their mistreatment of prisoners or accuse those who try and draw attention to their reality of just “trying to get media attention” as if that would somehow be a bad thing to an oppressive authority that really was going above and beyond like they claim.

So which is the real story? When I visited Guantanamo earlier this month, it was hard not to see things from the military’s point of view.

Because you were invited specifically by the military as a deliberate sympathetic voice given a cherry-picked tour of a facility that straight up blocks most genuine aid-workers who would have any experience whatsoever touring state prisons of oppressive authorities.

I mean, fuck, did you really think that the Gitmo military authority wouldn’t be scrubbing up and putting on their best face when allowing a very rare media presence? That this isn’t standard practice by any abusive incarceration facility whether it be the torture prison of some petty dictator or a poorly run American prison being investigated for complaints.

That you managed to fall for it hook line and sinker and then publicly continue to reference this on your paid writing gig for the Business Insider demonstrates that you are sadly probably well suited for a job of repeating what businesses would like the general public to hear with little to no critical thinking or self-awareness.

Take the incident that started the strikes: When a guard allegedly defiled a Koran during cell inspections. The base has clear protocols in place to prevent such an incident, with all inspections performed by a Muslim interpreter under the supervision of trained guards and under the direction of the on-base cultural advisor, a fifty-something Iraqi named Zak.

Zak tells me he doubts there was any breach of protocol — something the military officially denies as well.

It’s also hard to believe that guards, who already gripe about the difficulty of their assignment, would do anything that would make their lives tougher.

Dear Bob, where to begin with this rusty smear of santorum.

Um… let’s see, there’s the fact that the CNN article he directly links which is already pretty well aligned with American interests and perspectives to begin with notes that the detainees were actually willing to give up the right to own Korans entirely if it would only end the abusive searching in general. You know, because abusive and deliberately humiliating searches occurring at all hours, being incredibly invasive, and often physically or sexually abusive is sadly a common staple of American prisons.

There’s the fact that also in said article was a note that the protests were mostly about the denial of sources of heat in the winter and the direct impact that was having on their health and safety and were based entirely on the new commander not giving a shit about what they were previously allowed because “what the fuck, they are here forever anyways”.

There’s the fact that 2/3s of the Gitmo detainees are not only innocent by way of illegal torture or uncharged and indefinitely detained on bullshit, but full on, actually cleared of charges and ready to transfer innocent who have been forever locked in a hellhole and mistreated because while we’re ready to admit that they were innocent at the time. We, and any nation we would send them to, are now terrified that 10 years of torture and illegal detention might elicit a few anti-American sentiments and “terrorist” sympathies in their once-innocent victims.

And then we get into the “meat” of the fail as it were. The fact that he’s honestly arguing that prison guards would never ever abuse their charges if the rules say they shouldn’t. Because they would fear “making their jobs harder”. I mean… do I even need to counter this with all the “not approved” abuse that state and federal prison guards regularly engage in and the wealth of scholarship regarding it? Or get into the way that our illegal bullshit prisons only have the minimum of oversight that they do because of the sheer level of outright torture and other war crimes that were being committed there? Or mention that there’s only a “Zak” because Gitmo jailers in particular have been ripping up Korans as if they were the Hulk’s pants?

And that’s just the surface layers of the unblinking unquestioning bullshitting for an authority!

Zak demonstrated why Koran inspections are important, taking a hardcover Koran, flipping it upside down, and showing the wide opening under the spine.

Last time they stopped Koran searches, he explains, several detainees stashed medication in these tunnels of paper and then took the medication all at once in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Suicide is another effective way of getting media attention, and there remains a rumor among detainees that three simultaneous suicides would force the Pentagon to close Guantanamo — despite three suicides already happening in 2006.

In short, it’s not at all clear that the Koran incident even happened, and the strikers’ demand that Koran searches be stopped is impossible.

!?

The hebbitywhatthefuck?

I-I… Scuse, me, one sec, clearing cache of all critical thinking and basic level empathy and let’s try again.

Okay, so let’s forget the many many failures of… everything here, I’ll leave that to you all.

Let’s instead just follow the oppressive authority’s “logic” as if it wasn’t the half-farted post-hoc rationalization for the abusive system in place.

So, removing basic humanity and let’s go.

MOUTHPIECE MCSADJUSTIFICATION: Okay, so we need to search through the Korans. Super important. Why? Well, obviously, they might try to sneak things inside of it. What? Like shivs or bombs or super spy acid that will allow them to break their chains and go on a rampage of revenge ending in a dramatic helicopter escape and lots of pyrotechnics? No, not really. We’re mostly filled with grocers we yanked off the street one day because someone else we tortured threw out random names to make us stop. I mean, they might sneak in medicines… What? Medicine doesn’t sound all that bad and it actually seems to be pretty important to have considering that we’ve had a terrible history of getting life-saving medicine into the hands of our illegal detainees? Um, well they could swallow a lot of it and try to kill themselves… How would that be a security issue for the camp? Well, it could make the illegal prison look bad and bring media attention! Which is bad because… we don’t do anything bad anymore and besides we definitely need to look through Korans!

ROBERT JOHNSON: Clearly, given this impeccable chain of logic, we can only conclude that the Gitmo prisoners are Lying McLiartons and it is patently impossible that anyone in a location that has destroyed MANY Korans could have done it yet again once they were smug in the knowledge that their abused prisoners have literally no recourse of freedom at this point.

And… hurk… Sorry, I think the remnants of whatever remains of my black and tarnished soul just tried to violently expel itself from my body just trying to follow that.

As for the claim that detainees are mistreated, that also does not jibe with what I saw in Guantanamo. While indefinite detainment without trial may be morally offensive

Abort/Retry/FAIL Robert Johnson!

Anytime you find yourself going “blah deblah may be morally offensive”?

That’s your conscience desperately trying to cluebat you upside the head so hard you won’t be able to spell your name for a week.

Yes, it “may be morally offensive”. Because it’s a gross abuse of human rights, an international war crime, a grievous violation of the spirit of the law envisioned by our Bill of Rights, and one of the worst things we can do to someone.

We are literally taking random people and putting them in jail FOREVER without even the pretense of justice, without the pretense of a fair trial and refusing to fix our fuck ups when the regime changed because “it might make us look bad and besides they probably hate us now”. By choosing this action we actually managed to surpass many infamous oppressive systems in our cruelty to illegal prisoners. Apartheid South Africa? Colonial Era Britain? Yeah, exactly.

All the trappings and johnny-come-lately “comforts” that we’ve drizzled in front of the cameras and the locked out aid workers and lawyers is so much chocolate sauce on a mound of shit for all it matters.

Not that this obvious context seems to matter for Robert Johnson’s desperate “no, no, conservatives you are right to hate the most obvious victims of your obscene war crimes” bullshittery.

the overriding philosophy on base these days is to treat the detainees really well. Compliant detainees enjoy a selection of six balanced meals, 25 cable TV channels, classes, and an array of electronic gadgetry and entertainment. I’m talking about a Nintendo DS for every compliant detainee, plus Playstation 3 access with a library full of video games.

Conditions at Guantanamo are absurdly good for the simple reason of getting the media to leave them alone. This is the White House’s best option for making the controversy go away, since closing the detention center has proven impossible. It’s not a perfect option, seeing that Guantanamo is insanely expensive compared to every prison in the world, but that’s where we are.

A)Bullshit on the same crap they try and pull when claiming that our home-grown abusive hellhole prisons are somehow “luxury resorts for criminals”

B) Bullshit on “we’re a happy fun factory now that everyone is pretending we don’t exist and we no longer give a fuck about even pretending we’re seeking to end our continued war crimes”.

C) Even if true, how would that even begin to matter? They are denied their homes, their families, their lives. And they are kept in perpetual indefinite and extremely illegal bondage because our country doesn’t want to admit they ever existed, that they were ever wronged, or are at all owed a life debt (not to mention immediate freedom to whatever country they want and earnest apologies) by our government for all they have suffered. Even if their lives were an endless parade of fine cuisine, luxury entertainment, ivy league education, and constant sexual relief from the attractive appropriately-gendered person(s) of their choice, how the fuck would it at all mean fuck all to that central flaw?!? How would it all make up for the fact that the US’s stated purpose with regards to them is to “make them go away” from being discussed as an issue.

Maybe this might be one of the main reasons that the Gitmo detainees have so given up on life that they see death as a welcome release to their daily hell and why the Gitmo staff have given up on even trying to come up with bullshit to defend why they are working so hard to keep them alive against their will anymore.

But nice to see that even when conservatives are talking about the most obvious and regrettable victims of their policies, they still can’t resist painting them as some over-entitled fat cats sucking at the public teat in “undeserving” fashion.

But hey, as I noted up above, IT’S ALWAYS fucking PROJECTION!

It continues on with some more obvious self-serving bullshit, so I’ll skip straight ahead to the final stream of piss on the beaten and humiliated illegal prisoner.

Detainees read the news, talk to family at home, and have cable, they see what everyone else does. When they saw Obama failed to mention the camp in his inaugural address, they noticed. The last bit of hope maintained by many began to fade. They needed control and attention to get back in the news.

“They use our religion as a shield and a weapon,” Zak tells me.

Yes, a series of tragic figures, aware of their imprisoning country’s apathy to them, were made aware that there is not even the slim promise of hope. That they are truly abandoned to a life of hell because no one seems to care enough to risk angering the violent bully that is the US and stand up for the powerless. They were going to be forgotten and beaten and lost and possibly even just “dealt with” and there is literally nothing they can do to stop it.

The only power left to them was the ability to choose their own end and try and bring some final attention to their plight and what harm happened to them as they prepare to exist this world in final protest in the exact way that Gandhi had been prepared to do.

And the oppressive authority’s “see we have one of the sand niggers too” mouthpiece’s only response to this is “WHAT ABOUT THE OPPRESSORZ!” How poor America and Gitmo are being “hurt” by having media attention brought to the detainees’ suffering. How poor America is being victimized by these self-destructive victims daring to “shield” themselves from abuse and use their “weapon” of self-mutilation to hurt America… in public opinion.

Because somehow the prisoners forced America to abuse them and illegally lock them up without trial or possibility of trial. Because somehow the prisoners forced America to torture them and turn America’s name into an international synonym for unrepentant war criminal. Because somehow the prisoners are forcing America to refuse to release them. Or make them look bad to the handful of media that even pretends to care. Because somehow they are forcing America to continue to mistreat them and drive them to a point where suicide appears preferable to continued pain.

This is somehow all their fault.

Because if we actually dared acknowledge whose fault it really is, some personal responsibility might lightly splash on the conservatives who have done everything in their power to destroy these various people’s lives.

And nothing, literally nothing is too underhanded in service to preventing that.

As Robert Johnson aptly demonstrates here.